Styx is Just a River
by hodag
Summary: In an effort to create a parallel to the Girl from Gaea and win the war, Zaibach sorcerers summon their own girl from the Mystic Moon, a bitter medical intern named Sarah. Trying to find a place for herself within the Vione, Sarah quickly becomes enmeshed in the tangled past that binds Folken and Dilandau. T rating for language mostly.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note

Before we begin, know that I have made a few changes to the original story. I've tried to stick to the timeline, but there will be minor adjustments here and there. Zaibach becomes aware of Hitomi earlier than in the show and Dilandau is also a little bit older, think more in the range of 16 to 19 than 15. The rating is essentially the US rating R, mostly for language.

1

This was the end. Will was gone. He'd left me like he had always been threatening to and I was completely alone. He said that I worked too much and that he couldn't be dragged into my misery any longer. He said that he had tried, but that I was always too distant. He was done with me.

All these things were true. I couldn't remember the last time I had been happy. The strain of the initial round of applications, then the looming stress of the Match, and now the constant stink of shame and failure as I walked the halls the of the dead. I was an intern, fresh out of medical school, and I felt like it was already too late.

I decided not to leave a suicide note, it was too macabre and I wanted to just disappear, to sublimate into the grey slush of February. I was going to be symbolic about it though. I loaded up a backpack with my constant companions of the past eight years: Harrison's Internal Medicine, Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy, white coat, stethoscope. My hands shook as I locked the door for the last time but I ground my teeth and they stopped trembling.

This had not been a quick decision, and falling had been a fantasy of mine for a while.

I drove my car to a parking ramp near the river. Chicago was lit in the dirty yellow light of halogen lamps, steam rising from the grates and freezing in the winter night air. The sky behind the sky scrapers was a profound, inky black. I knew better though, beyond lay the endless Dakota stars of my childhood.

I had dressed for my death in a grey cable knit sweater dress, my long coat, my backpack full of books. I thought about leaving the coat, but figured that as it got water logged it would help me to drown. I crossed the bridge over the river to the middle, between two street lights. Will had left that morning, someone died on rounds and these events seemed to prove that the rhythm of life is chaos and loss. I wanted out, and this was the only thing I could control. I looked to the north and south sides of the bridge and saw no one. Probably too cold. I'd heard that hypothermia was not a bad way to go, and if there was any ice, it should be thin enough by the bridge to punch through. There were no cars coming for a moment. I was so utterly alone, surrounded by millions of people living in parallel lines. Swinging my legs to the other side of the railing, I rested my feet gingerly on the ledge, the tension of my arms holding on to the bridge behind me the only thing keeping me from pitching forward. The wind seemed colder and more feral on this side, screaming over the hungry blackness of the river below me. My stomach, a traitor, knotted up, anticipating the drop and the frigid water. Then I heard a car began to honk its horn and screech to a stop, a man's voice yelling. I had been seen. I stepped forward and let go. There was a rush of air.

There was no splash. The second thing I realized was that my right hip and hand were throbbing. My shoulders ached from the chafing of my back pack. Tall grass, soft grey in the night, surrounded me and the ground was firmly packed, dry soil. Above me, the stars were beautiful, even more vivid than they were back home. I could clearly see the lighter blue band of the Milky Way against the rich cobalt. Had that been it? So painless, so easy?

That was when I heard voices. Young men, speaking in a thick dialect that I couldn't place. It sounded like a hybrid between Russian and German, percussive the way English is. I gathered only a few words here and there before I caught the rhythm: "this way", and "here". I heard rustling through the grass, and a metallic clanging that was chilling; the sound of metal that had been sharpened for death. I froze and lowered myself to ground. I wouldn't die here, not this way. They were in front of me, slightly to the right and moving closer.

I had been the fastest girl in my high school. Not a huge accomplishment, given the size of the school, but I knew I was fast. I slid off the backpack, and angled my body away from them in tiny, incremental movements. I shifted my right thigh underneath me. I heard a call of a different male voice, again off to my right but further back from the other two. I exploded forward with the sound, stumbling at first on the uneven ground in my damn shoes then finding my footing. I pushed as hard as I could, pumping my arms, but they were faster than I. The first one tackled me to the ground and quickly tied my hands behind my back.

"I have her!" he yelled to his companions.

"Good."

"Now we can get out of here. We were never supposed to be here in the first place. Probably a miscalculation."

"Miscalculation? I doubt that very much, Migel. They don't make mistakes." The one named Migel, the one who had tackled me, heaved me up on my feet. I didn't get a good look at his features in the dark.

"You take her. I did all the work." He pushed me in the direction of the other man, who was taller but had a lighter, more lilting voice. He placed his hand on the tight ropes that bound my wrists. I thrashed against him violently. He didn't even move. I could barely move my bindings and soon gave up trying. I stumbled along beside him, through the clearing where I had…landed? There was very real fear growing in my belly. Once in the woods I tripped over roots, branches slicing my face. I settled into a sort of numb following. I had the impression that they were trying to make as little noise as possible and that the two were nervous. I wanted to scream but my throat was tight and dry. At length there were more men, and a little beyond that there were-I don't know what they were.

They were huge, metal. The metal was shiny, like the kind that they use to panel cars. They had a vaguely hominid shape, giant golems hunkering in the dark of night. They made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. He pushed me close to one.

"Will you let her down Dalet?" he asked. I thought he was referring to me, but the machine soon settled to ground. He opened a compartment on the back, and, though it was black in the woods, I could've sworn that he looked at me with pity. Then he cut my bindings, grabbed my legs and I was tossed in.

I've never been claustrophobic; in fact, I've always sought out small dark places. But the shutting of the metal door was so final. I scrabbled at the door with my hands, and the heel of my left hand caught a screw and began to bleed. The door didn't give at all, not in the slightest. I settled back down, sucking at the blood from my left hand. My clinical mind helpfully offered up that at least I was up to date on my tetanus shots. I sat in the dark for perhaps fifteen minutes, my ears straining for the slightest sound, trying hard to not imagine what it would be like to die in here. There was a sudden noise, a whirling of gears and pumping of hydraulics. The ground moved and I had the sensation of being lifted up. Almost as soon as I realized that the compartment I was in had stopped moving, there was a momentous shifting and we began to move forward in a rocking fashion that was not at all smooth. I was balanced on all fours. There was a change in the noise that the machine made and a sudden heat. The center of gravity shifted abruptly, and I was thrown off of my precarious balance, my whole body slamming into the side.

I panicked. I lost whatever tenuous grasp I had had on the situation and began to scream.


	2. Chapter 2

2

I slowly gained control over my panic when the center of gravity again shifted. There was that same pendulous gait, which I could only assume was this machine ambulating.

The machine came to a stop. The hissing of steam ceased, the whirling of gears slowed. The machine emitted some clicks, like all machines do when they come to rest. I backed as far away from where I thought the door was. In here was likely safer than out there.

There was a cacophony of screeching metal, heavy thuds, and voices. The hatch opened and I was blind for a moment in the bright, cool light. Someone grabbed my elbows and pulled me forward, setting me on my feet. We stood on a metal gangway. There were several levels of platforms and stairs and they shifted on suspension wires as the soldiers left their huge armor. There was a firm hand at the small of my back that pushed me towards a large metal deck. We descended a few stairs down to the platform. The soldiers, all in shiny blue armor and leather, lined formerly on the side of the deck opposite of me. They all had swords, big, curved ones. For the most part, the soldiers were male and uniformly young. One blonde soldier looked like he had just barely started puberty. Some of the others had stubble on clean-shaven chins. Two, a male and a female, had long purple hair. The one who held my arms had soft, ashy brown hair, a color that when girls have it they always dye to blonde. His eyes were blue and he looked nice, his face gentle and vaguely reminiscent of Will.

I heard heavy footsteps descending to the deck from a higher gangway level, and the soldiers' attention instantly focused there.

He was albino. No, that wasn't quite right; his hair was gossamer, quicksilver and spider webs. His armor was red and it was clear that he was the one in charge. There was no heaviness to his gait despite the armor. He was beautiful in the way that finely bred horses are, all sinew and long muscle. I looked at him clinically, taking in measure his evident health and strange coloring, trying to spot the syndrome. He descended to the deck level and it took me this long to realize that the soldiers around me had bowed.

"Don't stare," he said coolly, grabbing my chin in his hand and thrusting my head back. I had no doubt that he could've snapped my mandible in two if he had so desired.

"Who found her?" he demanded.

"I did, my lord." He came forward and I got a much better look at Migel. He was on the older end of the spectrum, in terms of these young men, and he had the stubble to prove it. He was attractive as well, with chestnut brown hair rakishly brushed across his forehead and arresting dark blue eyes. He held my backpack in front of him. He received a fractional nod in acknowledgement.

"What did you find?" another man's voice asked, coming from behind the lines of soldiers. They parted and a much taller man strode forward. This one had the build of a quarterback, tall and slim though still powerful. His hair was a very light blue, somewhere between flaxen blonde and that slate blue color that happens when black haired men go grey. He radiated excitement, and separated me from the man who held my arm. He walked around me, examining my clothes, my hair, my body. I realized at this moment that aside from the one tough-appearing female soldier, I was the only girl here. Things could disintegrate quickly. Rape was the specific word that came to mind. I wasn't dead and these people did not belong to the world I lived in, I was sure. Before pondering the implications of some sort of space-time travel, I recognized that I had no idea what women in this culture wore, and accepted the fact that I may have been extraordinarily underdressed.

"Is this her?" the captain asked.

"It has to be," the older, taller man said in a voice of bourbon and oak, "We will take her to the Emperor. He will be anxious to know if we have been successful."

"Indeed." The tone was bored.

The tall one reached towards my arm, and his arm was a claw, fastened in ivory and wire. I'd never seen its like and I blatantly stared. He looked uncomfortable, almost embarrassed, and he had nearly tucked his arm back in his cloak when my other elbow was grabbed roughly by the captain.

"Don't want to keep him waiting," he said in a lilting tone that was maybe meant to be funny but it wasn't.

They lead me out the hangar and down several dark corridors of shiny black stone. Blue flame flickered from the sconces on the wall, leaving flickering shadows made of the stuff of vague fears. We walked for perhaps fifteen minutes, passing numerous closed metal doors. The place felt like a warren, and Fiver's vision of the hall of bones flitted briefly through my mind.

"You needn't handle her so roughly. She has no where to run," the taller one said. The captain grunted and dropped my arm. I followed them dumbly. Now that they were no longer slowed by hauling me, the two quickly lengthened their strides, and it was all I could do to keep up without breaking into a run. We paused in front of a door, and the tall one opened it.

I was expecting some sort of receiving hall, or throne room. Instead there was only a large cloth screen that I instinctively knew was a projector. It flickered to life as the tall man flitted with some dials on a podium beside me.

An old man's face appeared on the screen, distorted heavily. I thought briefly of Oz. The two men prostrated themselves, and because I didn't move, I looked eye to eye with the emperor and felt strangely proud that I wasn't scared.

"Where do you come from?" the Emperor asked of me, his voice booming from speakers near a podium. I replied with the biggest city near my hometown.

"Fargo North Dakota."

The old man beamed; he even laughed. I had the distinct impression that though that he had never heard of place called Fargo.

"Are you a seer?" he asked.

"Excuse me?" A shadow of disappointment fell over his face and his tone was markedly less delighted.

"With your permission, my lord. He is wondering if you have ever seen the future or- "

"Influenced destiny," the old man on the screen completed.

"I don't think so," I said quietly. There was a very pregnant silence.

"Is it possible, my lord, that her powers have not yet manifested?"

"It is theoretically possible, however-how old are you, girl?"

"Twenty-three."

"She's a little old to have never manifested. Some women manifest when they bear." Nausea and fear pulled me very quickly in their undertow.

"Have you borne children?" asked the tall man, looking at me very intently. There was a very small spark of pity in his eyes, which were the color of venous blood, and I mentally reached out in response to the sympathy there.

"No." But tell me what to say, I tried to telegraph with my eyes. Save me.

The Emperor appeared deep in thought. I could feel the irritation rolling off the captain.

"Do you read fortunes?" the emperor asked.

"No," I replied, "I'm a physician."

I don't think I could have said anything more shocking. The Captain looked at me with a deeply furrowed brow, while the tall one's jaw dropped open and his eyes narrowed. The Emperor maintained his composure more neatly. Finally, he chuckled.

"You may decide what you wish to do with her, Folken. It is possible that she has not manifested yet." Abruptly the transmission clicked off.

The Captain laughed. It was one quarter-note loaded with derision and dismissal. He shook his head at Folken and stalked out of the room.

We stood in the dark without speaking. I shifted my weight from foot to foot.

"Come this way," he said and I followed him back into the dark corridors.

I realized that the only words I had spoken so far were "Fargo North Dakota, No, and I'm a physician". That was essentially all there was to it; if one were to distill me down, those words would be the most apt. Other people I'm sure would've spoken, would've found some narrative that contained what these men were looking for, but I had become some used to being mute during my real life that I didn't know how to matter to someone. Words can apparently be damning and everything that I had said so far was wrong.

We entered another room. This one was filled with books, a huge window taking up one whole wall. There were two celestial objects in the sky and I stumbled across the room, forgetting the man Folken and everything else. I knew what the other object was in my stomach, it took longer to process the word.

Earth. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was a warm, companionable touch, and I almost dissolved into tears. It was the first time here, actually the first time all day, that I had been treated like a person and for a second I felt the weight on my chest of suffocating black water; I felt cold numbness in my hands. The thought that just a few hours ago I had decided to die was terrifying. I didn't want to die now, not here, not at the hands of these people. I didn't cry though, the pressure building up behind my eyes and the fierce drumming of my heart reminded me that I was very much alive.

"I'm sorry," he said in that rich, deep voice, "Have a seat-" He suddenly blanched.

"I am so very sorry. In all of this, I never asked you your name. That was rude of me. Please forgive me." He gestured to the chair opposite the window. I sat in front of his desk like a kid in a principal's office.

"My name is Sarah."

"Ah. The lady Sarah," he said, smiling.

"It's actually Dr. Schmidt, if you are using an honorific." I said this quietly.

"Is it true?" he asked. He pulled out two glasses and a glass decanter of wine from a cabinet beside him.

"Yes. Where am I?" There was panic in my voice as I looked up at Earth. Maybe I was dead. Or this was purgatory.

"Zaibach. This place is called Gaea," he said and when there was no recognition on my face, he said with a trace of wonder "You really are from the Mystic Moon, aren't you?"

"If the Mystic Moon is there," I pointed out the window, "Then I suppose so." He got up and shuffled through some papers. I gratefully took a sip of my wine. It tasted more herbal than the red wines I was used to, but it was good. I hadn't eaten anything since the vending machine sandwich I'd eaten for lunch in between an admission and that patient dying so the wine went to my head. I saw her face briefly, hallows in her cheeks and sunken eyes. Where was she now? Was she somehow here too? Suddenly I felt very heavy, and I took a deep breath and another sip of wine. Folken very gently spread a map in front of me. It was a child's map of the world, full of cartoon cats and monkeys. The illustration style was familiar, it brought me back to the nursery in my grandparents' house.

"Can you show me where you are from? Where is North Dakota?" I gestured on the map to the small square in the middle of North America, west past the pinching fingers of Minnesota and below the weight of the Canadian north.

There was a knock at the door. At Folken's assent, it opened to reveal Migel, who had my backpack.

"Lord Dilandau thought you might like to see this," he said and handed it to Folken. Folken took out Harrison's Internal Medicine and briefly flipped through it. He picked up Netter's Atlas of Anatomy next, and this held his attention as he slowly paged through the pictures of humans dissected.

"It is true, then," he whispered, tracing an illustration of the thorax with his hand.

"There's this too." Migel handed him my bunched up white coat and a stethoscope. Folken nodded to Migel in dismissal and picked up my stethoscope.

"I've seen our apothecaries with these," he said, flipping my stethoscope over in his hands. He was enraptured with these objects, and his face burned with consuming curiosity. He stuck the stethoscope in his ears, but he put the earpieces in backwards. I gestured with my hands for him to flip it the other way, which he did, and then promptly stuck the bell on his chest. His face lit up when he heard his heart sounds. I sat patiently, barely able to keep my eyes open.

"I'm sorry," he said after about fifteen minutes of pouring over my things. I snapped back to attention; I'm fairly sure I was asleep.

"I imagine that you have some questions."

"Where am I?"

"Zaibach," he said patiently.

"What's Zaibach? Why am I here? Why is everyone asking if I'm a psychic?"

"Zaibach is a country," he gestured to it on a map that hung on the wall to my right, "And we are at war. It's a war to safe people from the senseless slaughter of war. To this end, we have been doing all that we can to ensure that destiny. A few days ago, that equilibrium was disturbed, and we have been trying to create the same sort of reaction, so that the balance of things can be restored."

"I'm sorry," I mumbled.

"I wouldn't be so quick to assume that you are the wrong girl. Many months went into this research. At the very least, your medical knowledge will be useful. I will have a meeting set up with our sorcerer on board tomorrow; I would be very curious to see what overlaps exist between your medicine and alchemy." I nodded.

"And you will excuse me for saying this, my lady, but you really do look quite exhausted. You've come a long way." He smiled warmly, and his voice was soft and soothing.

"I'm hungry too," I said.

"Of course." He stood and placed all my things back into the backpack. I was shown to a small room, no more than a cupboard, really, with a small attached bathroom. I sat down on the bed, and I was asleep before I was even fully laying down.


	3. Chapter 3

The river by my house flooded every spring, swollen by the snow melt. As the ice cracked, our normally placid river ran grey and tumultuous. The sandbags that we stacked along the banks always seemed woefully inadequate to me against the fury of the spring river. Usually we didn't have to leave the house but there were a few springs where I grabbed a favorite stuffed animal and as we drove away, I didn't know if we'd have a house to come back to. The thought of my small treasures lost forever in the water was traumatic.

One spring of particular violence haunted my dreams. We'd had a long winter and the snow had been deep. It joined the river in quick brown rivulets, the music of running water constant. I recall seeing my dad silhouetted by the headlights of his truck as he ran out into rain, which hit the ground in heavy drops, leaving bullet hole impressions in the mud. I ran out after him, throwing my small arms around his legs as the mud seeped through the knees of my nightgown. If he went down to the river, I would never see him again. I screamed into the storm; even as I did I was afraid that somehow the river was now alerted where my family lived and would creep over our fields and sneak through the culverts to drown us all. My dad didn't go down to the river that night. Instead, he loaded us into the truck and drove us to town. That night, the river crested the banks and flooded the whole first floor of our house. Our neighbors did not evacuate and their coffins were empty at the funeral, the river having swept their bodies away.

After that my dad always referred to me as his "knower". Most people in our town thought the genesis of this nickname was that I was good at school, but he only used it when he was being serious and he always spoke the name with a small measure of awe.

"Sarah," he'd say, "You're my knower. What do you think about this trip?"

My mom hated the nickname; she would always give my dad a glare that she thought I couldn't read. My mom was a God-fearing woman before anything else, and I think she thought there was something occult in my knowing, that I had done something bad to get it. It didn't occur to me to hide this from everyone else until elementary school. I accidentally predicted, during roll call, that a girl who had been gone on a road trip out west with her family was not coming back because she was dead. The girl and her entire family had been wiped off the face of the earth when a semi truck drove through their minivan on I-70. The other kids beat me up, as though I had willed her fate into being. The teacher went out of her way to never be alone in the room with me.

As the years passed, I'd come to regard my "knowing" as a series of hunches and lucky guesses, blown wildly out of proportion by my hyper-religious mother. Even as I wrote it off as nothing, it leant me a sort of calm when my team was on call during my internship. When the code pager would go off, its tinkling notes spurring everyone to grab their stethoscopes and run, I'd know what the outcome would be before we even got to room. The nurses would be performing chest compressions, anesthesia would be readying the airway, my senior resident would be sweating bullets, and I would be calm, known that the person was already dead and nothing that we did would bring them back. It was terrifying when I knew the patient would live because with every second we were exponentially multiplying the odds that this person would get their heart beat back just to live in an ICU for a few weeks until they got ventilator-associated pneumonia and died.

When I awoke, I felt like I had slept for days but I felt more exhausted than refreshed. There was a window in my little cupboard, and it looked like it was midmorning on a cloudless day. A tray of cold soup, rimmed with congealed fat, rested beside the door. I sat on the floor and mindlessly ate. Then I washed. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to leave my room and find someone, or if I should wait here to be found. I waited indecisively for about an hour. During that time, I looked out of my window and realized that I was on some kind of zeppelin because the ground was moving very slowly a mile below me. I thought about the dreams. I didn't know what to make of them; I was very familiar with the feeling I got about which people would live and which would die. I guess I assumed that I subconsciously processed all the information and came to a conclusion, not that it was due to some kind of psychic power.

I dumped the contents of my backpack out. White coat with my name embroidered on the pocket-this I realized could be a very real danger, full of antibiotic resistant bacteria and other horrible things that might not exist here yet. I jammed it under my bed, resolving to ask to have it bleached or burned later. I had the coat I had been wearing when I came over, a grey, military-style trench of warm wool. There was a second large pocket of the backpack that up until this point I had forgotten about. I silently pumped my fist in the air when I opened it. The last time I had used this backpack was when I had gone to visit friends in Sioux Falls. One pair of flannel pj bottoms, a pair of jeans, a baseball tee shirt, Chuck Taylors; all things that I had never unpacked, and then given up for lost. I changed out of my patterned tights and the grey dress and gratefully put on more comfortable clothing. Then I waited.

At length I left the room and began to meander pointlessly down the metal hallways. I passed the occasional guard in full armor standing still at attention. The first time they made me nervous and I was afraid they would tell me to go away, or escort me back to my rooms, but they were like stone and did not move.

The men in blue exercised in a gymnasium below me. Right now they were running in circles around the gym, the Captain in the lead with an easy stride. I sat perched on the railing and watched. They finished their laps then moved to push ups and sit ups. They set up what looked like circuits with the weights. For this portion the Captain walked among them and yelled at them. He would occasionally perform a station, but spent most of time policing them. Having nothing to do, I just watched. It was a little anxiety provoking, to be doing nothing when it seemed like I should be actively carving out a place for myself in this world.

"I had looked for you in your quarters," Folken said from behind me, sounding irritated.

"I'm sorry," I said, my heart in my throat. I wondered how they killed people on board, or if they just threw them off.

"Come this way."

The room was hung with skeletons of small animals, and the walls were painted with runes. There were no windows here, only those eerie blue torches. A small man enveloped in dark velvet robes rose in greeting and inclined his head in Folken's direction. He had a small blue goatee and his bald head was circumferentially tattooed with triangles, with the exception of his forehead, where a blue circle was tattooed in between his eyes.

"So this is the girl from the Mystic Moon," he said wonderingly, looking me up and down.

"Her name is Sarah. She claims to be a physician," Folken said to him.

"I had heard," the sorcerer said. He gestured to a table with two chairs on either side. Folken melted into the shadows. I sat opposite of the sorcerer uncertainly. The chair had a short leg and wobbled when I shifted my weight backwards. The sorcerer moved to a cabinet behind him and produced a glass flask with deep purple liquid inside. This he poured into a small tumbler, and placed in front of me. I didn't move to take it.

"Well. Drink," he ordered crisply as he set the flask back into the cabinet.

"I don't know what it is," I said.

"Refreshment."

"I don't believe you." Folken chuckled in the corner; it was the purring of a tiger. The sorcerer shot him an angry look and grabbed the tumbler away from me. He poured it back into the flask, muttering.

"Fine," he said and grabbed a necklace from a pocket of his robe, "I will have to hypnotize her." He sounded like it was great inconvenience for him.

"Just bring her deep enough to relax her," Folken said. The sorcerer gave an exasperated sigh, thrust the necklace back in his pocket and returned to the cabinet and looked within, evidentially not finding what he sought. Folken moved from the corner and his long arms reached around the sorcerer, and returned with a bottle, followed by three wine glasses on his second reach. He poured a measure of wine in each and set two on the table. He retired to the corner with the third. The wine was delicious and very relaxing. Because I was hungry and thirsty, I drank mine rather faster than was wise. My glass was quickly refilled. It was very alcoholic wine, and I felt immediately sloppy and at ease.

"You are young to be a physician," the sorcerer stated.

"I skipped two grades and went through the University of Wisconsin's early medical school placement program. I matched in medicine for residency. I passed the medical licensing exam." The sorcerer's quill scratched furiously on the paper as I spoke. I had a feeling that though Folken didn't write, he would remember all of this.

"How would you fix a wandering aura?" the sorcerer shot. I stared at him dumbly. He looked knowingly at Folken, triumph in his eyes.

"How would you stop a man from changing into a woman?"

"Excuse me?"

"When a man acquires the breast and belly of a woman with child," the sorcerer replied smugly.

"Where they have yellow skin, and bruise easily?" I asked.

"Yes I suppose they do," the sorcerer conceded with less enthusiasm.

"They have end stage liver disease; the cow is already out of the barn. Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot that you can do, other than make sure that they move their bowels regularly. They should probably stop drinking liquor too. If you can get them a new liver, maybe, I don't know if you guys able to do transplants."

The sorcerer looked incredulous. I grabbed the paper from underneath his hand, and snatched the quill. I drew a person from the front. There were lots of arrows and little words, but at the end it was a good schema of a cirrhotic person, despite the difficulties I had using the quill.

"Oh, and they aren't changing their sex. They have a big belly because of fluid accumulation and get breasts because they aren't able to metabolize estrogen as well without their liver. You can go after the fluid with a needle." The tenor of the conversation shifted from this point, and even as inebriated as I was, I knew that finally they believed me. The questioning continued, but it was clear that I knew more than him. They accepted my every word.

After the questioning, I was led out of the room and they leaned me against the wall. I was so drunk that it was everything I could do to stay upright. I don't know how long the sorcerer talked to Folken, but by the time they came out to get me my knees were about to buckle. My vision was swimming. I eventually wound up in my bed but I don't know how long it took me to get there or how.

When I came to, it was evening. I was wide awake, with the slight headache and queasy stomach that comes from drinking too much. I wanted to curl up in the bed and fall asleep again but I felt too sweaty and gross.

I stalked down metal corridors, up and down staircases. I felt acutely homesick and scared. I was trapped, literally, hundreds of feet up in the air in a world where men wore swords and there was only the thinnest of lines between sorcery and medicine. The windows offered a view of dark pastoral lands, with the same stars that I knew well and the two moons in sky, one of which was home. I sat down heavily on a metal staircase, my arms resting on my knees. This place felt like a hospital. I wondered if I could live in this ship in the same manner as a mouse, filching things here and there and living for the most part in darkened corridors and broom closets. I chuckled at the mental image of myself sneaking around a corner, so fast that only the flickering of a shadow was visible to the next girl that they summoned. She would look up at Folken, afraid and uncertain, and he would reassure her, saying "that's only feral Sarah. She went insane." My humor soured quickly. Perhaps there was a portion of this floating fortress where the mad girls were held, the seers and the fortune tellers screaming lunatic prophesies like the cries of tropical birds.

This was an unsettling thought, and as much as I didn't want to dwell on it, there was something definitely disquieting about this place and I thought back to the sorcerer's room with the skeletons and the runes. With definite intention, I packed up those feelings and tossed them away to a remote, dark corner of my brain.

By the time I made it back to my room, I was fully tired and the little cupboard felt something like home. I picked up the tray of food outside my room, and ate on the floor before returning to bed.


	4. Chapter 4

4

I was embarrassed when Folken came for me the next day. I was worried that I had been an obnoxious, sloppy drunk, or that I had failed the test. Instead, he led me to a large, white room that was adjacent to the docks where the armored suits were housed. He gestured broadly to the barren room and looked at me with an expectant smile. I smiled uncertainly back. Why was he so excited about an empty room?

"This is yours," he stated gravely. I said nothing but continued to look confused.

"For treating the soldiers," he explained, "We are docking today to pick up supplies. Tell me what you will need."

"So you believe me now."

"You ran circles around poor Quentain," he chuckled.

"Even though I was, ah, intoxicated."

"I think your knowledge easily surpasses his. Although I doubt you will be delivering many infants," he said with a broad smile, which made the teardrop tattoo beneath his eye look out of place.

"I talked about that?" I muttered.

"Yes. I'm sorry, we had to make sure you were in no state to lie, so I gave you the wine."

"It was different wine from what I had the first day."

"It was indeed. This wine is made in northern Zaibach, from the final fall crop of grapes, and is left to ferment longer."

"Making it much stronger," I finished. I finally felt at ease around him. I'd won my safety and his respect.

"It's Dilandau's favorite," Folken continued as I began to inspect my room.

"Who is Dilandau?"

"He is the commander of the Dragon Slayers. He wears the red armor," Folken gestured to his chest in explanation. He was trying to invent reasons to stay with me. I blushed a little when I realized this, and I went out of my way to avoid looking at him. This was hard; as I walked through the room he was always at my side, smiling and eager to gauge my expression as I looked at empty corners.

"If he's going into battle, he should probably drink something less potent," I said. Folken laughed.

"I've been trying to tell him that for years."

"Well, I suppose it's better for him to be a little buzzed than actively withdrawing. How much does he drink?"

"That is none of your business," said a cold voice. We both jumped and spun around. The Captain, Dilandau, leaned against the doorframe casually; his voice was anything but. `

"Folken, I'd like a word. I have heard that you and that sorcerer have deemed it appropriate for this _woman_ to treat my men, without my consent." He waved his arm dismissively at me. Folken straightened to his full height.

"Dr. Schmidt demonstrated that she has medical knowledge that far exceeds Quentain's."

"As much as I love hearing that our hack of a sorcerer was exposed to be a fraud, I still object."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, you don't have the authority to promote medical officers, whereas I do." The two men stared daggers at each other. Both had red eyes not quite the same shade. Garnets and rubies.

"Well, I can see that your medical ward is as big of a fantasy as her so-called expertise. I look forward to seeing how this goes. If one of my men dies at her hands, I will kill her and use her blood to paint my alsedies." He spun abruptly around and clanged down the hall.

"He doesn't mean it," Folken said adamantly, but I doubted that very much. He had talked about killing me with the same nonchalance as someone discussing their next trip to the grocery store.

We next set about to making a list. I requested any medical text that he could get a hold of, and drew out what I wanted my exam table to look like. I requested small curved needles and catgut suture. I wanted every common medicinal plant: belladonna, St. John's Wart, birch bark and foxglove. I wanted a note book, a blood pressure cuff, and the strongest clear alcohol that he could acquire, which he noted shouldn't be too hard as Dilandau had an adequate amount in his personal stores.

Folken had an engineer's mind, and looked forward to designing my exam table for me. It was not an unpleasant afternoon and we spent several hours in this fashion until he was finally summoned by one of his guards. I remained seated in what would be my exam room, and I wrote several other things on the list and described them in detail. A guardsman came by as the setting sun had turned my bare room into tangerine light and soft grey shadow. His arms were full of the sorcerer Quentain's books and I thumbed through them. I couldn't read the Zaibachian characters, but it gave me an idea of how far along they were in terms of medical discoveries. The anatomical drawings were fairly accurate, but they seemed to have a complicated belief system about power and magic. I resolved to ask Folken more about it later.

"I think it will take more than one evening to learn medicine," a crisp voice said. I leapt up from my book. Standing in the exact same place against the doorframe, it was as though Dilandau hadn't moved.

"How long have you been there?" I asked. He just smiled, his canines were so long, and he sauntered into the room with murder sketched plainly on his face. He was between me and the door.

"I meant what I said before," he said, fingering the hilt of his sword.

With the force of an ocean wave, his rage overwhelmed my senses. It had nothing to do with me; there was a throbbing wound somewhere that had been left to fester for years. There was a girl too. I saw her long black hair in the time it took to blink an eye.

"Who was she?" I whispered. His face whitened and he froze.

"How the hell do you know about her you _witch_?" he snarled. I didn't have words, the thoughts coming at me from him were so intense that I couldn't to process them and still speak.

"It appears you might not be entirely useless after all." He had mastered his emotions and now his face bore a cool sneer. He left as quietly as he had come, leaving me standing alone in a room bare other than a pile of books.


	5. Chapter 5

5

I thought about what had happened with Dilandau as I lay in bed. It had been so strange. It was almost as though he had sent me an image; that his snarling brain was laid bare before me. I tried to find out more about the girl with black hair, but she was locked down tight.

I also discovered that I knew that the name of the airship was the Vione, and that I didn't get lost anymore. I knew that when we stopped that day for supplies that the little cluster of buildings was a border town called Leed. This mundane geography and the reflection in my window of the Zaibach dress that I now wore were the final push into a full-blown panic attack. This whole time I had been waiting to wake up, but now I knew there was no going back. I would never set foot in America again. Behind all of this was the terror that somehow my will to die had blown open doors between worlds, which were now probably hurtling towards a cataclysmic end because I had been too weak to survive my job and had decided that dying was easier. I paced the length of my room, and with every glance out the window I felt a new blow of panic. I tried to will myself to look only at the floor. I picked the cuticle of my thumb until it bled.

I finally drove myself out of my room and I wandered out into the hangar. The Vione was docked outside of Leed. The hangar doors opened out onto a field, letting in the humid evening air of late summer. The mecha hung like bats, and the first time two zipped in and effortlessly docked I was so startled that I almost screamed. My captor Migel got out of the first one. Closely behind him was Gatti, the one who had transported me to the Vione. Guimel with his curly white blonde hair and startling green eyes and Brocet who had similar coloring but straight hair waited for them on the elevated platform. Gatti took a map out of his pocket and gestured to it while Guimel and Brocet looked over his shoulder. They nodded and promptly entered their own machines. The strangeness of knowing their names wore off quickly; I was grateful that they finally seemed like boys that I might know from my life before.

As the sun was beginning to set, a train of wagons labored up from the village. The beasts that pulled them were the size of houses and when they bleated it was the sound of the entire brass section of an orchestra.

Once they had pulled into the hangar and I had gotten my fill of these large animals with their potent odor, I was about to retire when Folken approached me.

"I would like you to oversee this," he said and I had to run to catch up with his long strides. Boxes of all shapes were being brought into the formerly empty room that I had come to think of as my office. As I looked around, two Vione guardsman labored in carrying a very large desk.

"Well, where do you want it? This room is yours," Folken said. My exam table came in while I was unpacking a box full of brutal-looking surgical instruments that looked in need of immediate sterilization. It was made just as Folken had drawn and I had described. The wood had the rawness of being freshly cut, and it was upholstered in deep red leather.

"Is it as you desired?" Folken asked, and I nodded.

"How did you get all of this?" I asked as I unpacked another box, this one filled with small vials, some filled with liquid, others with dried plants.

"I bought the apothecary."

"But what are they going do for medical care?" I asked, pointing out my window where Leed was a black outline against a dusky purple twilight.

"I hastened the man's retirement, so he didn't much care," Folken said tersely. He had been acting strangely since we came to the room. He was pleased that I was satisfied with the equipment he brought, and he thought that the exam table had come out smartly, which was important to him. But I would catch him looking out the window with a distant gaze and his mood oscillated at high frequency, one minute yelling at a guardsman, the next calling me over to explain what such-and-such an implement was used for.

I enjoyed organizing my room, trying to forestall the panic of being the chief medical officer for an entire airship with only one partial year of residency under my belt. It came together nicely though, giving me a small push of confidence. On the left of the room I had made a little fortress of the glass fronted cabinet with innumerable tiny drawers, my desk, and a book shelf. In front of that a cot, then my huge horizontal window that stretched the length of the wall with its deep bench. Folken had obtained several potted plants during his excursion, and these I placed on the window bench. My exam table and a few extra chairs were lined against the opposite side of the room, along with a large goosenecked examination lamp. Folken helped to organize, although he would often get distracted by the medical textbooks as he came across them. At length, when he saw the two moons beginning to raise, he stood up and stretched.

"As pleasant as this has been, I am afraid that there is still much work to be done tonight."

"I'm sorry." It was a Midwestern empathetic sorry but also an apology, because where I'm from we apologize for everything. I bent over three sets of dried stems that looked to me identical however had been labeled with different characters. I startled when he put his hand, the warm one, on my shoulder and I stood to look at him. Our bodies were close together and I resisted the urge to back up. His gaze was searching, as though looking for something in my face that would ameliorate his sadness. He did not find what he was looking for, evidently, and he squeezed my shoulder and left the room. I stayed up a while later to finish my work, and when I shut the door, it was with a sense of completion. I had built my new life on the skeleton of the old one.


	6. Chapter 6

6

There was just enough light to create long shadows. I ran down dark corridors with melting walls and past flashing mirrors. My hands felt sticky as the blood, her blood, dried. The monster I had just murdered rose slowly after she rattled out her last breath, and fixed her jewel blue eyes on me with an unblinking stare. She hunted me. She prowled through corridors with a hobbling, three-limbed gait, using both of her arms and hopping forward with the leg I had not maimed. With every turn, I could feel eyes crawling over me. At every turn, I expected to run into her; I didn't know where she was, and now that she was dead, I knew that I couldn't kill her again. But she was coming for me, I could hear her foot dragging across the dust of the floor as she looked for me.

I awoke in a sweat with my heart pounding. The dream had been very disturbing but it was quickly fading. I wandered out to the hangar. Two of the mecha were missing; they had been flying two-by-two since yesterday afternoon. I had the feeling that they were looking for something.

The sun was raising on the side of the ship opposite my office, and I watched as the light slowly spread over an apocalyptic landscape. Everything was charred down to ash; the ponds looked thick and oily. From up here I couldn't see the bodies but I knew that they were there. This had been Fanelia, and this was Folken's home. The revelation sunk in over several seconds. I must've picked this up from Folken last night. It explained his mood. I searched for anything else, but all I saw was the Fanelia that was, a little kingdom deep in the forest, full of lovely clear streams and sylvan glades. Now all was ash.

I was jolted out of my train of thought by the sudden clanging of bells from the direction of the hangar. I had heard two mecha docking not five minutes ago, but after yesterday it just became a regular marker of the hours. I ran out to where the soldiers were gathering. Guimel and Chesta climbed out of their machines.

"What did you find?" Migel asked of them.

"We think we found it," Chesta said, a little breathless with excitement.

"Should I go get Lord Dilandau?" asked Gatti. Guimel nodded and Gatti sprinted away.

"We were poking around the Asturian border, and we found a guymelef that favors Escaflowne," Guimel said to his comrades.

"What is it?" Dilandau asked and the men immediately stiffened and filed into a line.

"We found the Dragon, Sir," Guimel answered. Dilandau's eyes widened and his silver eyebrows shot up. Chesta remained quiet and deferred to Guimel.

"Go on."

"It's in the 'melef mews of an Asturian Caeli outpost."

"I explicitly told you not to cross into Asturia," Dilandau said slowly, "You are telling me that you defied my orders?" Chesta looked an inch from vomiting and Guimel ground his teeth but met Dilandau's eye.

"We did Sir. We crossed into Asturia." There was a long, tense silence.

"And we found the Dragon," Guimel whispered. There was a shadow of a smile on his face. His head was lowered, but he looked up at Dilandau. He was just a little bit cocky, for finding what the others could not. He was the second of the Dragon Slayers to be recruited, and had been at Dilandau's side for about a year and a half. He was fully confident that he would not be punished.

I leapt into the air at the crack of leather against skin. Guimel stumbled back, his hand to his cheek, but his elbow was caught quickly by Gatti who discretely pulled him back upright.

"Never disobey my direct order again."

"Never, Sir," Guimel whispered, a vivid red hand print against the pallor of his cheek.

"That said, I have grown sick of waiting. We are hunting tonight, boys!" Smiles slowly spread across their faces, and Dilandau left. I followed him.

"What are you doing?"

"If there are battle plans, I need to know them." Dilandau stopped and turned to face me slowly, his arms crossed. We were alone in the hall. My heart drummed in my chest. Unlike a normal person, it was impossible to guess how Dilandau would behave minute to minute.

"Why?"

"I need to be ready."

"Well, I guess it's better than Quentain ever did," Dilandau shrugged and continued marching on ahead of me.

We arrived at the door to Folken's study. Dilandau beat on it once with a closed fist and threw the door open with more force than was entirely necessary. Folken gave no sign of surprise at our loud entrance, indeed, he didn't even look up from the document he was reading.

"What do you want Dilandau?" he asked in an exasperated tone.

"We've found him." Pride infused his voice; it was strange to hear it sound almost warm. Folken pushed his documents back and straightened to look at him. He gave me a fractional nod.

"You are sure?"

"Yes. It is hidden at that Caeli fortress on the other side of the border."

"This complicates things," Folken said with pursed lips, the gears in his head turning audibly. Dilandau sat in the chair opposite Folken's desk. He pushed Folken's papers off his desk absently and unrolled the map that lay in the corner.

"What I'm thinking…" Dilandau trailed off, his eyes darting across the map as his finger tapped against his closed lips.

"We need to be very, very subtle."

"Obviously."

"I'm not joking, Dilandau. Poorly handled and we will have war on our doorstep before we are properly ready."

"Good. I'm sick of all this waiting and diplomacy."

"You misunderstand. You are so brash, ever eager to jump into the fray. We must exercise restraint. Aston is old and has no sons. He has everything to gain from a well-placed marriage with Zaibach."

"So the rumors are true, then," Dilandau said, leaning back in the chair with a leer on his face, "The rumors about you and the ugly daughter. I thought she was a priestess to Jeture? Is old Aston that desperate?"

"Nothing has been decided in that regard," Folken said firmly. It was plain to me that he wanted nothing further discussed in my presence.

"Fine fine. I was only having a little fun with you Strategos. I well understand the need to not get into a pissing match with Allen Schezar."

"Indeed. No pissing matches."

"We will just pay them a little visit, shake them up a bit."

"Schezar can ill afford another mark against him. I imagine that harboring a fugitive from us without the consent of his king would cost him dear."

"He was the one that was sniffing around the youngest princess' skirts, was he not? Sent away to the border before he could get her with a bastard?"

"Indeed."

"So it's settled. We'll go down there this afternoon, then set up a perimeter and wait."

They stood and seemed surprised to see me still standing by the door. Invisibility is one of my virtues, I guess.

"Doctor, what can I do for you?"

"I-well actually there's a few things I need to discuss with you. I can be brief if you are busy." Dilandau decided that this conversation was of no consequence to him and pushed past me.

"I would like to see the kitchens." Thus far, my diet consisted of heavily salted meats, bread, and the occasional soup. Recipe for gout.

"That can be done. Is there anything else?"

"Before an acute illness or anything like that, I would like to do a history and physical on the people that I will be seeing."

"I will draw up a schedule and distribute it to the Dragon Slayers."

"I assume I will be seeing kitchen staff, guardsmen, and mechanics as well?"

"If the need arises. I would prefer that you did not focus your energy on ancillary staff."

"I also need animals."

"Animals?"

"Yes, like mice or rats."

"We usually trap them and throw them over, but I will have them brought to you instead." I nodded and stood.

"Oh and Doctor?" a trace of a smile tugged at Folken's lips, "I much enjoyed yesterday. It was the very highlight of my day." I nodded and abruptly left. I didn't want to see whatever was playing through his mind, and I hoped speed would prevent me from knowing, as though thoughts were contagion.

In the quiet of my office, I sat on top of my desk and watched as the ashen landscape became progressively greener. I wasn't ready for that look in Folken's eye and the things that went along with those looks, and I was nervous. I believed that I had established myself as a person to be respected and therefore as an asexual entity; I was wrong.

I didn't have very much experience with boyfriends. A function of skipping grades was that everyone was always older than me; everyone thought of me as a baby. Justin, my first boyfriend, had me by two years. He was not the brightest, which was probably why we dated even though I was so much younger. We started repeating conversations by our second month. He was very hurt when I broke up with him, and in retrospect, I really was quite cold about it. Then came a couple of random dates in college, nights out, things like that. College became very isolating after sophomore year because I still couldn't drink legally and everyone else could. They'd go down to State Street and I'd stay in my dorm and study for my MCATS. The summer after a lonely junior year I stayed in Wisconsin to do a medical research internship. There I met Will, a biomedical engineer. He was Mormon, so we spent a lot of time together not drinking. His faith was deep, but his hormones were stronger, and it was ok because we were going to get married, right? Now that I thought about it, our relationship had been going downhill for quite sometime and I think Will did everything to save both the relationship and probably his soul. Instead of marking our decline with fights, we marked it with quiet distance, a slow pulling apart. Decay.

It's not that I didn't enjoy falling in love, it was the feeling of being out of control here that scared me. And to be truthful, I didn't even think of him or Dilandau as human men. I stood and walked over the mirror that had apparently been in the apothecary's shop and tried to look at myself through a man's eyes.

I tried to unsee my long, narrow nose, like an axe blade across my face. My eyes are the color of battery acid or possibly radioactivity. My eyes are too big for my face, and whenever I tried in college to make my eyes dark and mysterious with makeup I wound up looking like I had been punched. My hair is wiry and reddish in color and almost always pulled back into a pony tail. I'm short, with a figure deficient in the things men find interesting and my skin is very pale with lots of small red freckles. On the whole, not a girl for whom one would launch a thousand ships.

Overall, I didn't like this current train of thought, alternately feeling nervous and ugly. I set out my bandages and suture. I played around with different suspensions of cocaine in saline. I really needed to get experimental animals.

I heard the guymelefs deploy in the early afternoon and watched them fly in eerie formation. All afternoon we waited. The Vione was unusually quiet, and it was hard for me to concentrate on the titration that I was doing. Evening settled in, and I made my way to the bridge of the airship. I had never been there before, but Dilandau had so I found it with ease. This room had giant, multi-story windows and a myriad of controls. Folken sat in a chair in the middle of the room and appeared surprised to see me. He insisted that I take a seat beside him.

I inched my chair back from Folken. I could tell he was unnerved and distracted by my being next to him unannounced, so I made myself as inconspicuous as possible, a skill that I gained with long practice. I needed him distracted the better to experiment with my new skill. I let my eyes go unfocused, staring into the distance.

I couldn't hear his thoughts, not exactly.

He was restless. This was in large part because he hated Dilandau and was convinced that he would screw this up. This hatred went deep, and encompassed both numerous arguments and insubordinations, as well as open disgust for _what_ Dilandau was.

Associated with these thoughts was the image of that girl. She had thick black hair, ivory skin, grey eyes. She was very, very pretty. Other than her image though, I could glean nothing else.

He was also irritated because he was uncomfortable with the substantial portion of him that didn't want them to capture Van, and feared for him at Dilandau's hand. He resolved to kill Dilandau, quietly and efficiently, if Van died. The image of Dilandau with large white hands, one that was ivory and wire, around his throat gave Folken a sense of justice, and increased his comfort with the idea of taking his own brother captive.

My eyes snapped back into focus and I stared at Folken. His own brother? Before I could learn anything else, one to the pilots cried out and pointed out the window. There was a fire; the fort was burning.

"Patch me in," Folken commanded.

"Dilandau, what are you doing?" Folken asked.

"I'm smoking him out, Strategos."

"What if I told you that he wasn't there? What if I told you that they were escaping right now, by the waterfall in the cliffs behind the castle?"

"They're behind the castle?" Dilandau began to bark orders. The guymelefs uncloaked and began to fly. There was a small airship, I was impressed that Folken had seen it at all, that was creeping low along the course of the river. The Zaibach guymelefs began to harass it, and suddenly there was a white guymelef. I couldn't see the details of it, it was too far away, but I heard Folken's sharp intake of breath. There it was. The Escaflowne.

It was hard to watch, but it was strange and beautiful and terrible all at the same time. Our boys shot flame at the machine, which looked like a bird made of bones and cloth. Its flight was desperate, and I found myself subconsciously hoping that it would be able to escape. I kept telling myself, five minutes then I'll go back and get ready.

I don't know how long I watched, by I finally wrenched myself away from the control room and headed to my study. I got a pot boiling, I put the metal operating instruments in it, I had a moment of panic when I took stock of my trauma experience. Better me than that sorcerer though. The cot had wheels, so I rolled it into the empty hangar, and I waited.

I stood in this posture of readiness until I got sick of shifting my weight from foot to foot. I sat up on the cot. I was glad I was wearing the plum Zaibach dress, shapeless with lots of detail on the sleeves. I didn't want to ruin my clothes from home with blood stains. I hoped that none of the boys got hurt.


	7. Chapter 7

7

It was about three hours before they got back. The red 'melef landed first. Behind it came three blue ones, carrying the larger, white machine between them. This was maneuvered, not without difficulty, into the back of the hangar. The Escaflowne was placed in a sitting position, with much manipulation and application of pulleys, as well as the shifting of the hangar platforms to accommodate the large machine.

As the other soldiers came in, it was plain that no one was very hurt. I wondered if perhaps it was excessive to send thirteen soldiers to catch just one man. I maneuvered my cot to where I could see the Escaflowne. Dilandau and Folken stood in front of the machine, while the other soldiers gaped on the platform levels above them. At length, Folken approached the machine, placed his (normal) hand up to a sort of red stone embedded in the breast of the machine, which suddenly glowed an intense pink color. With a hiss of steam and the pop of a latch, a body spilled out onto the floor.

I raced forward, pushing Vione guardsmen out of my way. If he didn't have a pulse, we would need to start chest compressions right away. With each second, the chance of his staying alive dwindled.

As soon as I flung myself down in front of this boy, I abruptly moved in the wrong direction. Leather gloves shoved me back and for a moment I thought that Dilandau was going to bite me.

"Stay _back_." His tone brokered no argument. I put my hands up and backed away.

The boy was young. I could tell from this distance that he was breathing but unconscious. Folken was kneeling at his side. I watched him grope for a pulse on the neck and he appeared satisfied; at least his heart was still beating. That said, there were a thousand other deadly injuries that he could have. This boy probably had sustained a skull fracture and while we did nothing here his brain was probably squeezing out of the base of his skull.

"Well done," Folken said to no one, getting up from his knees, "More roughed-up than is entirely necessary, but I am pleased." He motioned for Dalet and Chesta to get the boy onto the cot and they began to wheel him away.

"I need to examine him!" I yelled, my voice strident in my ears, but they ignored me.

I felt frustrated and out of control as I slammed the door to my study shut. I picked up a glass jar, my hand becoming a claw around it as I fought with the urge to smash it on the ground. My jaw was locked tightly against the stream of cuss words bubbling up. So much for the respect I thought I'd won.

My heart stopped when I noticed that half of my morphine was missing.

Yesterday, while Folken and I unpacked the apothecary's boxes, I found a vial full tiny, dark grey seeds. Folken had told me then that 'Sleeper's Brew' was something that apothecaries used for insomnia. Sleeper flower, he had explained, was a beautiful orange flower, grown in a place called Freid. Monk-warriors guarded the blooms, to protect them from addicts who sometimes took so much that they died sleeping in the fields. He was obviously describing opium, and I had immediately started to grind up the seeds and suspend them in saline. I hadn't gotten the chance to administer a test dose to the rat that came to me that afternoon. I couldn't even guess as the potency of what I had created; I had planned to administer it to the rat and to see how it did so that I could come up with a weight-based dose.

My eyes fell across the notebook on my desk where I wrote out exactly what I thought the solution would do and I experienced a moment of sheer panic.

But no one could read English, particularly not in my wretched penmanship. I shut my eyes tight and tried to pick up any trace of a memory, as though they were shed from our minds and I was some kind of mental forensic scientist. Of course, I found nothing. I resolved to get a lock and to hide my journal. I went to bed, full of sick worry that there was someone on board with a glass of poison waiting for them.

I dreamed that I sat on a beach. The night was warm and the sand sparkled under the glow of the two moons, while the sea was undulant and calm, though further out waves broke in thunderous rhythm as they met the rocky outcroppings of the bay. The sea was a negative space, save where the distant white caps roiled. The sea foam that rode in on the tides sparkled on the sand like caches of pearls. I was waiting and the excitement quickened my breath and stretched my tendons taut as bow strings.

A chevron of water crept towards me. Emerging, her lovely face peeped out from beneath the water. Her eyes were black against the white of her skin, her face framed by her long dark hair. Her small shoulders peeked out of the water, and I stood, overcome with the want of her. She stopped a moment, demure, and then as she held my gaze she rose from the surf, the moonlight on her wet skin causing it to shine like polished silver. I ran into the water towards her; I kissed her lips and I felt her warm body under my hands.

I woke myself up. The dream had taken an erotic bent and it felt voyeuristic. Normally, when I am nervous, my dreams are in similar tenor. I dream of exams or murders or river floods. I don't dream of kissing pretty girls; I wasn't normally attracted to girls. There was something off about the dream too. I was not exactly a maid at this point, and as the dream progressed the rhythm was off, like someone dancing for the first time.

I recognized her face but where had I seen her before? The thought gnawed on me as I went through all the faces from college and the wards. And then I recognized her, and my whole body went cold. I leapt out of bed and began to pace.

This dream was not mine. It was Dilandau's. The girl was the one that I had seen both in his mind and in Folken's. The nightmares, those too belonged to him.

I wandered out of my room and made my way towards my office with the intent of administering my moonshine-morphine to the rat, in the hopes that I would discover that the solution had no potency. Gatti was walking down the hallway in the opposite direction towards me. I blushed just slightly, a hold over from that dream about boys and girls. He smiled uncertainly and stopped.

"Good morning! How are you?" I wasn't intending to be flirtatious but I was.

"I am doing well, lady. It is kind of you to ask. How are you?" His voice carried the faintest accent. He was probably a year or two younger than me. There were traces of Will in him, the sandy hair and angular face. Gatti's skin was better, no acne there, and his cheekbones had been sculpted well. He had broad shoulders and was quite tall. I came only to his sternum.

"Oh I'm doing well." I didn't want the conversation to end just yet, because as I spoke, I caught him wondering if I had forgiven him for stowing me in the cargo compartment of his machine.

"Where are you from?" I asked. His face brightened and he smiled, flashing brilliant white teeth. Did they have braces here?

"I'm from Vina."

"Where's that?" I realized this was a stupid question because I didn't know where anything was.

"It's an island, closer to Asturia, actually, than Zaibach-" He continued to speak, but I was paying more attention to his thoughts.

Vina was a beautiful island, surrounded by mellow azure seas and constantly bathed in a warm breeze that tousled the tops of the palm trees. The buildings were white and stately with red terra cotta roofs. There was a particular sound in Vina when it rained, a bright percussion, when the drops bounced off the red tiles. The stones selected to pave the streets were red and blue. Women wore silk and had pet monkeys that sat on their tanned shoulders as they strode the marketplaces and boulevards. There was money to be made in Vina, and the large bank, made of polished white marble, was the island's crown jewel.

Gatti's family was military. His father had been a Zaibach general, his grandfather an Asturian one. Mereck, Gatti's older brother, was an artillery man in General Helio's branch. Gatti at this point outranked him. This had caused a fair amount of drama within his family, as marriage prospects looked from Mereck to Gatti. The attention did not suit Gatti, used to being invisible beside his brother.

"-so the island has switched sides not a few times. In my grandfather's day, it was Asturian. They switched allegiance to Zaibach in the first few years of Emperor Dornkirk's reign."

"Dr. Schmidt, may I borrow you for perhaps a moment?" Folken asked as he strode down the hallway towards us. Gatti felt instantly worried, feeling that he really should've hurried in getting the message he carried to Dilandau. I reached out and touched his arm, warm and leather-clad.

"It was so nice talking to you." I walked towards Folken. He smiled at me, and when he spoke it was in a calm, measured tone. However, he was so anxious that I too felt like I was about to vomit.

"I need your assistance with something." He walked so quickly that I could only follow behind him. He opened the door to a room, where a boy, his brother, lay on the bed as still as death.

I forgot about Folken. Van had a pulse and was breathing albeit very, very slowly. He was young, no more than fifteen or sixteen with a healthy tan stretched over lean muscles. I peeled back his eyelids. His eyes were the same color as Folken's, though with perhaps more amber. His pupils were pinpoint.

"When did you give him my morphine?" I asked. He panicked a moment but very quickly acknowledged my accusation.

"An hour, perhaps two."

"What route?"

"Excuse me?"

"How did you give him the medication?"

"Injection."

"That was really stupid. Really, really stupid. I have no idea what the potency is, you could have easily overdosed him. But he's going to be fine. I think," Folken relaxed fractionally, "Next time just ask me, ok? You could have easily killed him."

"I know." I think it took a lot for him to admit that.

"He had received some shocking news," Folken confessed, "and was angry. Agitated. I wanted him to relax, so that we may discuss things rationally."

"Who is he?" I asked though I already knew. I wanted to hear him say it.

"He's my brother," Folken said slowly. He watched my face carefully to gauge my reaction.

"Why did you need to capture him?"

"Because he is the king that is resisting our efforts at present. I thought if I reached him first, he wouldn't have to die."

"It's a pretty weird way of trying to save someone."

"I know. He is my only blood left. I think if he could just be made to see reason, he will come to my way of thinking."

"I wouldn't send Dilandau after my worst enemy, much less my own kin."

"Well, the capture of him was commanded by General Adelphos and the Emperor himself. I'm afraid I didn't have much say in the matter."

"Ok Pontius," I muttered as I left, but Folken said nothing and stayed at the side of his brother.


	8. Chapter 8

8

The rat was asleep and most certainly not dead. I carefully marked the dose down in my journal. I looked at the rat, a giant grey bastard, with pity. I would need kill him eventually to work out the toxic dose. Suddenly there was huge boom and everything tilted to the right. The lamp fell over, the exam table slammed into the chairs, and books flew at me from the bookshelf. The rodent hit the floor with a sickening, dull thud.

Things quickly righted, but I was shaken. We had maneuvered the Vione into a kind of canyon with deep walls on either side; the inside of the canyon made my ears feel buzzy. The canyon was filled with stones that seemed to float, bobbing up and down. I guessed that one of these stones had hit the Vione. Just one of those stones. Then the bell began to toll in frantic tattoo.

I opened my door to see Guimel and Dalet running in the direction of the hangar, and I sprinted after them. The hangar was full of smoke and something obscured the opening, which should have been shut. Guimel and Dalet drew their swords as they ran and disappeared down the stairs that led to the hangar floor. A man dressed in a collection of mis-matched armor pushed past me and I staggered into the wall. There was a hand at my elbow.

"You shouldn't be here!" Migel shouted over the din. He pushed me back in the direction of my office.

"Stay there and bolt the door!" he yelled at me. As he spoke, a man with long blonde hair began to sprint towards him, sword naked and fixed on Migel. I just screamed and covered my eyes. There was no reciprocal scream and when I peaked through my fingers I saw Migel, his sword locked against the blonde man's. I screamed again when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

"He's right. You aren't safe here," Folken's voice stated in a tone that was strikingly calm. Without looking back, I blindly followed his order and slammed my office door shut. The quiet was striking after all the noise of the hangar. What would happen to me if we lost?

There was the occasional scream, but gradually things began to die down. I continued to pace, randomly picking things up and putting them down. I boiled my instruments, I set out my suture, I twisted a band of stretchy fabric that I could tie around a severed limb around and around my own arm, and tried to calm down. I contemplated opening my door but it was too scary. I felt utterly trapped, but if I stayed quiet, perhaps I would be left alone.

They banged on my door, and I opened it slowly, fully expecting to be sliced sternum to navel and die with my guts on the floor. But it wasn't the mismatched pirate or the man with the long blond hair. It was Migel and Guimel, between them steering Dilandau. He was mad as a rabid dog, his hand clamped to his right cheek, bloody smears apparent on the porcelain whiteness of his skin.

"I WILL KILL THAT FUCKER DEAD!" he bellowed. The rest of the boys followed into my room, nervous as hell and clearly rattled.

Our attackers had been Asturian, and they had recaptured the prisoner. This much I gleaned from their thoughts, and I was glad that no one had been too terribly hurt, though I needed a much closer look at Dilandau's wound.

I motioned for him to take a seat up on my exam table, which he did as he spat curses. I dunked my hands in strong, clear grain alcohol and was nostalgic for nitrile gloves, gloves of teal, purple and powder blue. More than that I longed for OR gloves, layered snugly on my sterile hands, stretching almost to the elbow of my blue sterile gown. This was going to be disgusting, but my hands, drenched in high proof alcohol, were bound to be cleaner than the blood-stained leather gloves that came with the rest of my surgical implements. I tucked a porcelain bowl under Dilandau's chin. I took some of my home-made saline and broke the vacuum seal with a satisfying pop and proceeded to irrigate the wound.

Dilandau opened his mouth wide to protest, which of course let flow even more blood as he stretched the area.

"You're making this much more difficult than it needs to be. Stop moving your mouth," I whispered, my words muted from everyone but us by the splashing of the blood-stained water into the basin. He glared at me as though willing my head to explode, but said nothing.

I saw nothing at this point other than the wound on his cheek, which stretched from the arch of his cheek bone down towards the angle of his jaw. He had been terribly lucky, both in that the sword had missed his eye, and that it didn't extend all the way into his mouth.

After I had thoroughly irrigated the area, I drew up a syringe with a small amount of cocaine suspended in saline. This I squirted directly on to lac, and was gratified to see the bleeding slow. It was such a small amount that I doubted that any that got into his bloodstream would cause a high. Without losing time, I took up the curved needle tied with catgut suture using the needle driver, a familiar tool I had been grateful to see amongst the apothecary's tools.

The Dragon Slayers stood behind me in a semicircle, watching with crossed arms to see if I did in fact know what I was doing, but my world shrunk to this lac and I confidently drove my needle into his skin. There were little bits of geography that I noticed being this close to his face. He didn't have any facial hair on his cheeks, but there was some coarseness near his chin where he shaved it down. There were several tiny red dots by his ear, cherry angiomas. His skin was soft; the needle went in easily. I instrument tied, sliding the knots down from the tip of the hemostat to the surface of his skin. The catgut got a little bit sticky, but was surprisingly pliable.

There were twelve stitches in all, simple interrupted sutures marching in orderly fashion down the curve of his cheek. When I sat back to view the whole thing, I was quite pleased. The skin edges came together nicely without puckers or gaps. His blood coated my hands and I gratefully washed it off. As soon as I turned around, I caught his hand moving towards his cheek. I slapped it away, wanting to protect my art. He grabbed my wrist and forced my hand backward. I cried out in pain and he smiled.

"Never presume to touch me like that again," he hissed.

After I had bandaged it up, I turned to take a better look at the Dragon Slayers. For the most part, they looked shaken up and ashamed, though Chesta stood in the back of the group, leaning heavily against my desk. He looked confused.

"Get Chesta over here," I said, and the boys parted to make way for him.

"What happened to him?" I asked.

"Bastard knocked him on the head," Migel said, "We found him slumped up against the wall by the prisoner's room." I did a quick neuro exam, which was all normal other than some fumbling on the date. Just a concussion then.

"He's going to need to rest in here for a while."

"So be it. I want an audience with the rest of you _now."_ Dilandau stalked out of the room and after a moment of shared nervous glances and bobbing Adam's apples, the rest of the Dragon Slayers filed out. I went with them after tossing a sheet over Chesta and had a sudden sensation of foreboding. The next time I did this I would cover his face. It was a creepy sensation and I looked at him closely. His exam was normal. Heads are surprisingly hard. I should stop worrying and leave him alone. He would need rest now anyway.

Dilandau had a large throne, flanked by statues that I first thought were lions, but on closer inspection were in fact snarling wolves. He had a small desk to one side, remarkable only for the decanter of wine in the corner. Dilandau sat in front of us, stroking the bandage on his cheek with enough pressure that I could see the blood start to well up under his finger. The room was utterly silent, though I heard the frantic, quaking thoughts of eleven minds. You could almost taste Dilandau's anger as he sat and allowed them to stew. Gatti had not been where he was supposed to be, Brocet had let the one dressed like a pirate get away. Biore, the purple-haired sister of Dalet, hadn't gotten there until almost the end of the fighting. I was nervous too, and grateful that instead of having to stand up in a line with the rest of them, I got to lean against the wall in the back.

"I used to be beautiful," Dilandau said softly.

He didn't speak again for nearly three agonizing minutes. I was confused. He was vain, the other men joked about it all the time behind his back. But his tone seemed so sincere; it was almost mournful.

"I've never been so disgusted. You were supposed to be the best." He stood and the men before him cowered. He shouldered roughly through them and slammed the door as he left. Dalet put his arm around his sister and she forcibly bit back her tears and shrugged his arm off. She didn't want him to succeed in making her look weak in front of the others. They filed out singly and did not look at me.


	9. Chapter 9

9

Chesta was pretending to be asleep when I came back to my office. I did nothing to allow him to think otherwise, and sat down in front of my journal, detailing both his and Dilandau's treatment plans. Careful documentation on my part would help me find my mistakes more quickly since this was cowboy medicine at its very best. It was difficult to ignore Chesta, however, and eventually I gave his thoughts my full attention and began to doodle in my notebook instead.

He tried to rest but every muscle was tense. Through the fog of his concussion, the thought that Dilandau was going to kick him out of the Dragon Slayers kept finding him. Dilandau must know, he must have discovered, that what ran in Chesta's veins was as Astorian the blood of a knight Caeli. Even after all the time that Gatti and Biore had devoted to teaching him how to hold his sword right, he still swung it like the farm boy that he was. If he had practiced more, fought through the blisters and the blood, he would have bested Allen Scheazar and the prisoner would not have escaped. Instead he lost his grip of the sword with embarrassing ease and when the cold steel just grazed the underside of his chin, he knew only that he didn't want to die. Like a coward, he put his own life before the mission of the empire and it was his fault that Van escaped. He had never deserved this uniform.

Chesta Milroy grew up the only son of a crofter on a large estate just outside Pallas. The estate was old and had been grand and prosperous, but Chesta only knew it in decay. The front of the house was pink, covered in ivy and badly in need of new shutters. The drive in front was paved with loose shells, which hadn't been the style in many a year and there had never been more than one carriage parked out front in all of Chesta's short life. The manor sat surrounded by fields where wildflowers grew, and in back the mistress of the house once had a garden that now lay fallow, the roses now a riot of vine and thorn. Beyond that the trees took over completely. Chesta grew up on just the other side of the chase from the manor house, but in all his life he never cut through it. Before he was born, the little daughter of the manor had been swallowed up by the wood. She had been just a girl of three or four. Chesta's sister told him that her skeleton sat propped up at the base of a gnarled old tree, still in her little blue dress with its sash tied in bow, eyes long plucked out by crows.

Many of the families surrounding the estate believed that the little girl's disappearance was a curse brought on by her father's unhealthy obsession with the Mystic Moon. The lady of the house never went outside after her daughter's disappearance, and her only son, still a child, kept his hair long in mourning. It was not clear, however, how keenly the girl's father felt her loss. He continued to divert the profits of the estate, levied from crofters like Chesta's father, to fund his expeditions. Rather than allow this to drive him into utter poverty, Chesta's father began to hold back a portion of his crop each year, to be sold on the sly in Pallas. He and Chesta would make the journey in the cold morning hours once a month and pocket the profits, which Chesta's mother hid in her wedding chest.

They abandoned the farm in the dead of winter and took an airship to Zaibach. The airship was old and they were crammed cheek and jowl with other peasants, looking for work in Zaibach. Chesta's father spoke to no one in particular about the opportunities there, stating again and again that he was no one's slave. Holding on to his mother's hand, Chesta remembered everything about that ride, from the cold iron girders to the garlic and yeast smell of the woman standing in front of him. He was still very young, all elbows and big green eyes but he understood fundamentally that they were escaping to a better life. He could be anything he wanted to be Zaibach. If they had stayed in Astoria he would have worked the farm. After taking a wife, one of the three girls he had known for his whole life, he would add on an addition to the small cottage where he grew up. When his father died Chesta and his wife would move into the room where his father and mother had lived, and when he died his sons would bury him next to his father and grandparents in the parish graveyard. It wasn't until they crossed over into Zaibach that he felt the fingers of this destiny finally loosen from his throat.

They moved in with Chesta uncle in an industrial city close to the capitol. Uncle Beren dabbled in the trafficking of some illegal substance and they lived off of his charity. The cities were flooded with peasants from the rural corners of Zaibach as well as scores of families just like them who had fled fuedal Astoria. It was difficult to find work, Zaibach merchants and foreman favored workers from their own country. Chesta and his father found temporary work in foundries and factories, always first to be laid off. Eventually they were hired to work with the road crews. Instead of a hoe in the morning, Chesta grabbed a large hammer and a measuring stick, his job to find and fill potholes. Occasionally, he would drive the guymelef used to haul rock up from the quarries to pave the roads. They made only enough to get by, and without the assistance of his uncle they would have been homeless. Chesta became angry and depressed and found that he missed the long cool grass and the birdsong. Instead his lungs were choked with acrid smoke and he heard the clang of hammers even in his sleep. He was part of a faceless mob of starving immigrant men, walking to work through the greasy smog of early morning. Having forsaken their own country, they lived Zaibach but weren't a part of it, haunting the margins like ghosts. Even here in Zaibach, his Astoria blood still marked him, even though he actively purged all traces of his accent out of his tongue.

In the apartment building where they lived, the Astorian families gradually moved away or were lost to whatever disease had been ravaging the poor that year. They were replaced by refugees fleeing the recent conflict in Codibar. The apartment building always smelled like fish. Chesta got into fights regularly with the Codibari boys. They would jump him after work and try to steal whatever they could off of him. Chesta relished the fights.

One sunny day in late summer, grimy and exhausted from working the road crew, Chesta sat on the stoop of the apartment drinking lukewarm water from the pump in the town square. His sister was coming up the street with a basket draped on her arm. On this particular evening, she was followed by three soldiers well into their cups. They paid her pretty compliments and she kept turning around, flirting. The soldiers were Migel, Dalet, and Brocet. Brocet was clearly the drunkest and also the most besotted of her. Chesta stood up from the stoop and sauntered towards them, a long stick used to measure the size of potholes swinging from his right hand.

"Nia, are these men bothering you?" he asked, angry and tired.

"No Chesta," Nia said, her eyes warning him not start something.

"You boys aren't welcome here," he said, wanting badly to provoke them into trying to hit him.

Migel laughed heartily at this, but their bodies tensed and Dalet and Brocet instinctively fanned out. Brocet lunged first. Chesta smacked him neatly on the thigh with his measuring stick, dancing around the bigger boy, slow with drink. Brocet lunged again and this time Chesta got him on the ribs. When Brocet dove for his feet, though, Chesta wasn't quite quick enough and went down with him, hitting his shoulder hard on the pavement. Brocet got in a pretty good punch before Chesta was able to roll away and regain his footing. The tenor of the fight changed dramatically when Brocet drew his sword.

"I don't think it's quite the occasion, Brocet. He's just a boy," Gatti said nervously. At this point, Chesta noticed that the crowd around them was substantially larger, and there were more uniformed men. The attention of the group polarized towards a man in red armor, whose look froze his blood.

"Gatti give him your sword." Gatti drew and offered the hilt to Chesta, his face apologetic. Gatti's sword was heavy, but not as heavy as the hammer he used to tamp rock into holes in the road. He effectively blocked Brocet's charges, and his own were answered with the bright clang of steel on steel. He was thrilled at the feeling of the sword in his hands, he felt powerful. He realized that as Brocet sobered, his hits had more force and he moved faster, skirting away from the tip of Gatti's sword. Sensing his advantage, Brocet charged aggressively and beat Chesta back until he tripped on the back step of his uncle's house.

"Enough," Dilandau said softly and Brocet immediately froze mid thrust and backed away.

"Never thought I'd see fighting like that in the ghetto," Gatti said with a smile, reaching his hand out for his sword, and once that was sheathed, offering Chesta his hand.

"What do you do, boy?" Dilandau asked, though obviously Chesta's mind had supplied these names later.

"I drive the guymelef for the road crew," Chesta admitted, inspecting the new tears in his clothes. Chesta was shocked to see the effect this produced, though didn't understand why until later. Cavalry was changing as technology improved, and Dilandau's unit had that very day learned that they were to stable their horses and take to the sky.

"You fight fairly well. Are you indentured?"

"No, I work for-"

"I don't care. Would you like to graduate from fighting this riffraff and become a soldier of Zaibach?"

"Yes." He hadn't even needed to think.

Gatti, as second-in-command, was in charge of most of the clerical work involved in making Chesta Milroy a Dragon Slayer. He took Chesta's measurements and got him his own sword. Gatti was also probably the best swordsman in the company, with the obvious exception of Dilandau. He took it upon himself to teach Chesta the finer points of swordsmanship.

"You're good," he'd say, "But you're coarse. You swing a sword like you're swinging that hammer."


	10. Chapter 10

10

When I returned to my office the next day, Gatti was waiting for me. He handed me a piece of paper with a warm smile.

"I can't read this," I said.

"Oh, terribly sorry. My apologies, I just assumed. I suppose you read this," Gatti said with a vague wave to my bookshelf, which actually only contained two volumes written in English: Netter's atlas of human anatomy and Harrison's tome. I pulled out my notebook and the only quill that I could write legibly in.

"What does it say?"

Gatti placed the paper next to my blank sheet and leaned over me, his right hand resting on the table as he gestured to each word with his left.

"This symbol here is used to indicate time. These are the numbers of each hour." His index finger journeyed down the page, tapping at each symbol down a column.

"You start with Guimel. Then it's Migel, Viole, Brocet, Biore, Dalet, myself. This afternoon you have Chesta, Scout, Doman, Raffio, Yue. I hope you do not have any concerns with the schedule as it is? Lord Folken wanted me to convey to you that he didn't have any understanding of how long these things would take, and if there are problems with the order of names please take issue with me, I made the list."

"This should be fine. Thanks for you help."

"My pleasure," Gatti said with a casual salute.

My first patient was already waiting outside. Guimel leaned against the wall, humming to himself. He sat up on the table and I sat across from him.

"What's your full name?"

"Guimel."

"Last name?"

"Just Guimel." He had no chief complaint, no family history, and a negative review of systems.

He was small and lean, with numerous old scars that were livid purple against his pale skin. He didn't speak as I went through my exam. Clear green eyes, teeth remarkably good. No enlarged lymph nodes in his neck, he had a very soft flow murmur, lungs were clear.

The boys lined up outside the door, and I interviewed and examined them one by one. They gave me curt answers and silently complied with my exam. The surliest was Biore, the woman. She spoke to me in monosyllables. But I had to make sure she was ok.

"And are you sexually active?"

"No." The faintest blush crept onto her cheeks.

"Are you safe?" I asked, now paying attention to her thoughts. Other than mortification, nothing. No one had taken advantage of her then. She was substantially taller than I, and had broad shoulders and big thighs. She also had big breasts, at least a D, that were taped down on her chest with a large band. I didn't ask and I went about my exams efficiently.

As I suspected, the visions happened later that night when I sat down to write my notes.  
They started with the smell of water-the tang of salt and the fragrance of the soft green moss blanketing the stones beneath the waves. My head was full of the sound of water slapping the hull of a boat accompanied by the rhythmic dip of oars.

The water surrounding the island of Codibar was slate grey and cold. The mainland was out of sight, but Basram and Zaibach were the closest countries. Codibar belonged to no one really, and for much of Guimel's life the island was left alone, with the exception of occasional merchant vessels seeking shelter from a storm. Guimel's village consisted of an outcropping of perhaps a dozen stone dwellings with sod on the roof. A summer, perhaps two, before Basram invaded, Guimel married. He couldn't have been a day older than 16 the day he married her. She looked like me but prettier, more curves and the waves of her red hair were more relaxed and soft. It remained the happiest day of Guimel's life. He wore his best jacket and pair of new wool pants while she wore a pretty homespun dress, a small green stone at her throat.

Codibari weddings were musical affairs, and Guimel's voice was high and clear. Fionna sang more softly, her voice almost a whisper. They'd married by the bay, and following the binding of their hands, they waded out as tradition dictated and dove under together. She popped up quickly with a gasp, right hand still clasping Guimel's left. He lifted his head just slightly out of the waves before grabbing her by the waist and dunking again, to the amusement of all. She splashed him playfully as they waded back. The rest of the day was passed in song and drink, and Guimel's recollections became somewhat foggier as his brothers pressed drink into his hands. He did vividly remember leading her over the threshold of the cottage that they would now share, stones newly mortared together.

As a married man, Guimel had his own craft, eight feet long that he painted a garish red. Fionna could always pick out his boat when the men rowed back with their catch. When word of the massacre first reached their town, the women met the men on the pebbled beach as they pulled in their boats. It was all rumor and accounts varied widely, but it seemed that a ship had landed, and men and machines had killed everyone in a village to the south. The men gathered together to decide what to do. Their blood ran high; nothing this exciting ever happened.

When Guimel returned to his house, he took up his harpoon.

"You're going then," Fionna said gravely, stand up to meet him. Guimel nodded.

"I have to Fi."

"Why?"

"Because no one has the right to kill our own."

"Then you're going."

"Yes."  
"There's no way I can talk you out of it? My gentle man going off to war?" Fionna moved across the small room suggestively; she tousled his hair and pulled on his ear.

"I don't think so." His breath came quicker. Her warmth evaporated; she sighed and smiled a grudging sort of smile.

"No one said you weren't brave. You'll be safe though? You'll stay with the others?" Her blue eyes were huge.

"My older brothers are going. I'll be safe with them." The tears began to course down her face and she threw her arms around Guimel. Tears welled up in his eyes too though he didn't know why; he hid them in her hair

"I'll be safe, I promise Fi."

The following morning, he gave his youngest brother his hoe and left him, age thirteen, in charge of defending hearth and homestead. His brother had seemed absurdly small on the beach as the shore receded, as Guimel, his two older brothers, and four other young men headed off to war. They'd agreed on a small but strong group of the most able-bodied men to head south and defend their island.

Spirits were high, the young men drunk on adventure. They drank whiskey by campfire on unfamiliar beaches and slept deeply, muscles sore from the brisk pace. They had miscalculated how much fresh water to bring, and three days out from home they put in to a village easily twice as large as home. Guimel stayed with the boats. He was proud of his red craft, and always enjoyed seeing the appraising looks of outsiders. He saw his oldest brother run out of the village first and he slowly stood up. Something was wrong.

"They came north," the eldest said, running to his own boat and moving to push it into the waves with haste, "God help us they came north."

Guimel didn't remember anything of the return journey other than feeling sick. His brothers were grim as well, thinking of their own wives and children.

The shore was in total disarray. The blackened hulls of boats lay on the beach like the skeletons of whales. The ground had been torn open by iron clad hooves. Once within the bay's mouth, Guimel jumped out and swam to shore. There was a group of quiet women and old men waiting to meet them. His mother reached her arms out to him, but Guimel ran past her. It couldn't be. The cottage stood, mortar still in place but the inside stones were blackened. Buckets and baskets were tipped over, fishing line was strewn everywhere. He screamed her name, but he couldn't hear himself. There were arms that caught his shirt, his mother's touch comforting and firm. She was dead then. Guimel sunk to the floor howling, his mother kneeling behind him, holding his shoulders and weeping with him.

Codibari funerals, like weddings, require songs. Guimel's voice was hoarse as he sang to her. Fionna's body was in the care of her parents. They constructed the funeral pyre and had been waiting for Guimel to come home before laying her atop it. His brother met him there as he sat on driftwood, staring at the pyre awaiting her body.

"I'm sorry. Guimel." He wept, but Guimel had nothing left to feel or offer. His brother began, haltingly, to explain how Fionna had died.

The Basram soldiers came into town from the west, where Guimel's cottage stood. She didn't have time to flee. He had been a coward. He intended to stand there and beat off the armored horsemen with his hoe, but at the last moment his courage failed and he fled. They dragged Fionna out of the house. F Guimel's brother could see that she fought like a cat, screaming and cursing. They'd tried to force her down. Here Guimel held up his hand. He didn't want to hear this, but his brother continued as though blind.

"She had your knife. Your fishing knife. She tried to stab one of them, but she missed." She managed to free her arm again in the scuffle, and stabbed herself. Right under her ribs on the left. Right into her heart and she died immediately, his brave girl. Guimel said nothing and his brother's story probably continued, but Guimel retained no recollection of it nor of his brother leaving. He only knew that he sat alone on the beach and stared at her waiting pyre, and that his fishing knife appeared at his side. Once the last light faded, he stepped into her parent's home. They had been waiting for Guimel to indicate when he was ready, and when Guimel picked her up, her father grabbed the end of flaming log that sat in the hearth fire, and followed him to the pyre by the beach. But Guimel walked past the pyre. He walked between he rows of cottages and his neighbor's grey faces lined the street as the news that Guimel was burning his wife spread.

He laid her gently in his boat as though placing her in a cradle, the waves rocking her gently and before anyone could stop him, he lifted the bow of his boat off of the pebbles of the beach and pushed it entirely into the ocean, leaping into it once he achieved enough momentum.

He rowed furiously, until he could barely see the cottages. He drew up his oars and lay them on either side of her. He wept then. After tenderly arranging her hair and touching the curve of her cheek, he struck up a match, dropped it, and leapt into the water.

He could see the hull of his red boat from underneath the water as he sank. If he did not swim, their bones would join the sea at the same time. It would be so easy to die here, to never try to reach the surface. But his body was traitorous, and as his lungs began to burn his arms began to pull him towards the surface. He didn't look back as he swam to shore.

He had gone far enough out that by the time he finally felt mossy sea stones beneath his hands he could only drag himself part way onto the shore. He was uncertain for how long he lay there, the water licking his calves until they were raw, but he eventually stood once dawn began to creep across the horizon. In the predawn silence, he shambled through the stone buildings and out onto the pasture land beyond, away from both her and the sea. He would sink the blade of his knife into as many Basrami necks as he could until death caught up to him.

Guimel mostly lived off of what he could forage in the marches and what he stole off of the corpses that he claimed in honor of Fionna. In the evening Guimel would take off his shirt and paint his chest and face with woad and clay in honor of the god who crept in from the sea to sow pestilence, whose whisper turned a man to madness. He'd slip into the periphery of a military camp, and quickly slit the throats of the soldiers sleeping within with his fishing knife. He would say her name when their eyes opened in surprise, as their life's blood fled. He'd then slip back out into the night. Word travelled around the camps of the army of Basram that there was a Codibari ghost that visited the camps at night exacting his revenge. Guimel was clever about it-he never hit the same camp twice and never from the same side. Sometimes he would follow a camp for weeks before making his move.

He had been following the foot army from the south for two weeks when he realized that he was not the only one who was stalking this army. There were two men, clad in black field uniforms with swords at their sides, who stalked the Basrami army just as carefully. He followed them at a distance for several days, until one day he stole close enough to here them speak.

"Stop being so nervous, Migel. You'll give us away," the one with silver hair and red epaulets whispered calmly.

"I'm sorry Sir. It's just that I can't shake this feeling-"

"That we are being closely observed?"

"Yes sir."

"That would be because we've been tailed for close to three days you idiot."

"Sir?" The junior officer paled.

"I'm fairly certain it's the one they call the Codibari ghost. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he's in earshot. I heard him a couple miles back." Guimel was taken aback. Should he kill these two? The senior officer held up his hand to the other one and the three of them remained in uneasy silence as night fell.

It was his stomach that betrayed him. It growled loudly, once, and he was close enough that the silver haired one's head shot over in his direction. He slowly and carefully picked his way towards Guimel, careful not to make a sound.

"I think our aims are the same here. We also outnumber you," Dilandau hissed. Heavily, Guimel stood from his screen. The silver one smiled in self-satisfaction at his appearance.

"I told you so," he said to the junior officer, who just stared at him. Dilandau led them away from the Basrami camp without a word, and Guimel followed, uncertain.

That evening, under the cover of darkness as they were too close to light a fire, Dilandau proposed that Guimel join his unit, so elite at this point that the only other member was Migel. As he had nothing else to live for, and because his home would be forever haunted by Fionna's ghost, Guimel agreed.

They stalked the army for several days, collecting data, before rejoining the main Zaibach force. The other soldiers gave Guimel a wide berth, though Migel forgot to be afraid of him. After making their report, the army forced marched to the other side, where they met up with the army of Basram in really what was just a skirmish. The commanding officer of the Codibar theater died in the fight, however, and in the chaos that ensued Dilandau quickly took control.

In the first of the two decisive battles, Dilandau sent a flying column, led by Guimel and Migel, around the eastern flank of the Basram army and forced the enemy to retreat up a tall hill. Dilandau called them back, had them regroup, then threw all the man power he had at taking the hill in the second assault. The hill was strategically defensive, and the body count on both sides was high before Basram surrendered. Unlike other generals, Dilandau did not direct his troops from safety, he was in the thick of the last battle, knee deep in bodies. So much blood soaked his uniform that it was stiff when he removed it.

On the day of the surrender, Guimel and Migel stood in the tent behind Dilandau's camp chair. By this time they had forged a sort of brotherhood in blood and the two could read each other's body language as well as if they spoke. Dilandau had been irritated for the past four days, which had been the time that it took to take the hill. Guimel had heard communications from Zaibach lauding Dilandau for his initial victory but begging him to pull back until reinforcements could arrive with trebuchets. The aide-de-camps had exhausted themselves trying to find him during the battles, constantly insinuating that the army as a whole would be better served if he removed himself to direct the movements of troops from afar.

It took every once of self control for Guimel not to stab the Basram general when he walked in. He wore full plate armor and a long red cloak. His skin was perfectly clean and his white moustache oiled into points. Migel had lightly taken hold of his upper arm, to hold him back as his hand yearned for his fishing knife, worn beside his Zaibach-issued sword. The general appeared incredulous, no doubt because Dilandau looked no older than seventeen.

"You have won," the General said, his eyes scanning for Dilandau's supervising officer or perhaps even his parents. His tone was incredulous. Dilandau stood. He moved across the room with a wolf's hungry eyes, and the air crackled with intensity. Dilandau slapped the general full across the face, and slid his sword into the abdomen of the bodyguard who sprung forward. Blood seeped across the Basram general's feet and his hand flew to his hilt. Dilandau's sword hovered over the man's wrist before he could unsheathe the thing, just enough pressure to leave a red welt.

"Unwise."

"You monster."

"I accept your surrender. I'd also advise you to humble yourself when offering it, however. Remember that for next time." Dilandau sheathed his sword.

"Next time?" the general sputtered indignantly.

"The next time I defeat you," Dilandau stated plainly, the challenge writ large in his eyes.

They returned to Zaibach on one of the first boats the following week. Guimel made it a point not to look back, or think overmuch about leaving his home for the first time. Because his heart had died with Fionna, his soul would return back here once he died. Without a heart, he had no purpose, which was oddly freeing. He would live out what remained of his half-life, and be reunited with her upon his death. For the most part, he lived his life joyfully and without much reflection. Though Guimel did wonder, laying in his bunk at the end of the day, if what he did was just.


	11. Chapter 11

11

By this point the sun had set and the only light was the eerie blue glow from my lamp. I'd seen death before, but only in the medicalized setting. I kept experiencing, over and over, the tension in my hands as I held someone down, the warm rush of blood over my hands as I slit their throats, accompanied by that metallic smell of iron; all murders that rightly belonged to Guimel but were now mine. I tried to busy myself with things around the office, but I kept seeing the blood across my hands and the red of Fionna's hair, vivid copper even in death. More and more I wondered if all of the Dragon Slayers had similar stories, if they were all culled specifically for their violence. The lure of this thought was almost obsessive, and I finally locked my office door and sat back in my chair with my feet propped up on the desk, opening myself to their stories.

Migel was one of those young men who was naturally good at everything. He was charming, good looking, smart and lucky. His sisters teased him for the care that he took with his hair each morning, and his friends teased him for being bookish; he bore all this with an easy smile that made girls swoon and always landed him on the right side of trouble. He was a born horseman, and for the past few years had regularly taken the top prize in barrel racing. Mothers and daughters of their small town agreed that he would make a most agreeable match. His family, while not the wealthiest in the valley, had cattle, land and money and because of his inherent good luck Migel never developed an ounce of common sense.

The summer that Migel turned seventeen, his father started bringing him along when he conducted business. Migel would bring them coffee when the meeting began and take a seat beside his father, nodding energetically and laughing at the customer's jokes, all the while thinking that he would rather die that do something so dull for the rest of his life.

Migel did an excellent job concealing his boredom. He did so well, in fact, that he was invited by name to a meeting of the most influential families in the valley. General Carghetti, a close friend of General Helio, had retired from the army a decade prior and bought up most of the land on the north side of the valley. With his connections at the capital and vast wealth, he quickly became a figure of authority. Every month he would host a dinner for the most important men in the valley. The usual topics of discussion were the price of cattle and the timing of the year's harvest. The conversation was technical and dry, and did not hold the seventeen-year old's attention very well at all.

What did hold his attention was Lalia, General Carghetti's several-decades-younger wife. As the most junior person at this dinner, Migel felt that he should try to blend in, be agreeable, and not open his mouth and reveal his ignorance. When he found himself standing next to the young hostess, he tried his best to mind his manners and be forgettable. He thought at first that she was just being polite, making him feel important by sticking around to talk to him. She looked full up into his face with a beaming smile, revealing small, square teeth. She touched his arm and laughed at his jokes. He hadn't intended to drink, but he was nervous in such close proximity to her, uncertain how to behave. The more he drank, the more he treated her like one of the village girls he had kissed behind the school. She seemed to enjoy this, and insisted that he be beside her when they sat down at the table.

During dinner, she kept touching his leg. Migel became nervous. He hadn't intended it to go this far. He didn't want to offend his hostess by turning down her advances at this point. He started wishing for the dinner to end, and nervously downed several more glasses of wine and moved his rabbit around his plate with his fork. Here his memory became fractured; Migel wasn't paying attention to anything being discussed, the only thing that mattered was that small, warm hand on his leg. I think there were details his mind added later, because there was suddenly a loud, very crisp image of Dilandau that did not move.

Dilandau had been invited to Carghetti's estate to get him out of the capital for a few weeks, to wait for tempers to die down and memories to fade. It wasn't clear what had happened, but even Migel, distracted as he was, picked up on the honor Dilandau was accorded by his rank as well as the faint notes of disgrace that lingered in the conversation. Before Lalai had fixed her attentions on him, he had watched Dilandau. The boy was about his age, perhaps even a little younger. Dilandau's appearance was striking, with his pale skin and silver hair standing starkly against his black uniform with red piping. It was different from the one he wore now, this one with trousers with red stripes down the side tucked into leather riding boots. He had a close-fitting jacket, the seams again trimmed in red and he had a red sash tied underneath his sword belt. Dilandau had been spliced awkwardly into Migel's recollection of dinner in a way that was jarring. My stomach contracted; something bad was going to happen and Dilandau had something to do with it.

When the men left dinner to go to the billiards room, Lalai had grabbed onto Migel's hand with a mischievous smile on her face. She took his arm and insisted on showing him the gardens. There was a moment, a second, where Migel thought of pulling his arm away and following his father and the rest of the guests into the manly sanctuary of the billiards room, but his hand was tucked in her arm. Out in the garden, there wasn't much to see in the dark and at this time of year, but it was quickly made clear that admiring the plants had not been the intention of his hostess. She turned and launched herself into his arms and found his mouth. She tugged him down to the ground and pulled at his clothes. Her flesh was warm and her mouth was sweet, it was exciting and he was seventeen.

No one noticed when he returned to the men in the billiards room with the exception of Dilandau, who leaned in the corner, wine in one hand and a thin cigar of the kind they favored in the capital in the other. The corners of his lips lifted just slightly, his eyes taking in Migel's wrinkled shirt and mussed hair. He knew. Migel was confused and disoriented, drunk off hormones and wine.

He tried to make sense of it as he and his father rode home. His father was talking about a controversy involving grazing land boundaries, but Migel just responded with affirmative grunts, his mind clearly elsewhere and his father eventually gave up.

The following morning, he was awoken by strong hands hauling him roughly out of his bed. General Carghetti glowered over him, his face blood red and contorted.

"To take my own wife under my roof!" He punched Migel in the gut. Migel was dragged without ceremony out of his house, past his parents staring with wide eyes, and whipped with a riding crop on his stoop. It was early enough in the morning that no one was there when they started, but by the end most of the village was gathered around him. He fainted and awoke in a jail cell.

The pain was excruciating and Migel couldn't move. He lay on his stomach on the jail floor, his left cheek pressed against the cold, hard soil. Who betrayed them? With his knowing smile, it must have been the outsider, the albino Dilandau. Anger flared briefly and Migel clenched his fists, but the pain of tensing his muscles put an end to that.

He drifted in and out of fragile sleep and painful semi-consciousness. The cell was dark and he lost track of the hours of the day and indeed where each day begun and ended. No one spoke to him and he was fed once daily. He began to try to convince himself that he was guilty to try to justify his imprisonment, but this justification was difficult when the charge was unknown.

His mother came for him. She opened the door with the heavy iron keys. Her hair was unkempt and she looked gaunt and unwell. Migel struggled to sit up.

"Mama!" Migel began to weep uncontrollably.

"You must be quiet." Her voice was even softer than a whisper. Migel nodded and tried to master his tears.

She helped him to his feet and dragged him out the door, where his horse was saddled. There was a sharp odor of freshly hewn wood. A new gallows cut through the soft blue shadows of the square, its hard angles at odds with the friendly facades of buildings that had witnessed Migel's childhood. She pressed a big leather bag full of coins in his hand.

"You must see a doctor about your back once you are gone from here."

"Gone?"

"Yes. You must go far from here, and never come back." Migel bowed his head and the tears came again.

"My poor, brave boy." She took his chin in her hands and lifted it up. She kissed each cheek.

"Now go, there isn't much time."

Every time the horse's hooves hit the ground, Migel sobbed from the excruciating pain jolting through his back. He rode the horse hard, until it began to stumble, and by then Migel figured that he was far enough away from his home that he could walk the horse safely. The day was beautiful, likely one of the last kind days of autumn before winter hit. When he heard the distant sound of a hunting horn and the baying of hounds, he could pretend that he was just out of a ride. A few hours later, he heard them again, only they were closer. He realized suddenly and sickeningly that they were hunting him. He spurred the tired horse into a canter. Migel knew all the game trails and had been sticking with them, now he employed every trick he learned from hunting foxes. He went in circles, he rode up streams.

His horse sensed Dilandau's big red beast and Migel turned to see him just coming around a copse of trees. Migel cursed and urged the horse forward.

"I don't think he has many more quick getaways in him. I'd let him rest," Dilandau shouted, urging his own destrier forward. Unlike Migel, who sat his horse as though he were a centaur, Dilandau was an awkward horseman, constantly bouncing around and looking at any moment like he was about to lose his seat. Migel reined in his horse and shut his eyes, realizing that he had the advantage and that knocking Dilandau from the horse wouldn't be that difficult. He could steal that horse and still live. His blood boiled. When he sensed that Dilandau was next to him, Migel threw a hard punch at his shoulder, thinking to knock him out of the saddle. Dilandau grabbed his wrist easily and nearly threw him from his horse, letting go and allowing Migel to grab the pommel just in time. Dilandau had speed, strength and rest on Migel, who had been underfed for the better part of a week with weeping, scabbing sores on his back.

"You betrayed me. You were the one that turned me in!"

"You really think I care that much about this provincial shit?"

"Well, you caught me. Now you can bring me back so they can whip me again."

"They weren't going to whip you, they were going to hang you."

"What? But I didn't- "

"Yes, you did. I think half of that dinner party saw the General's wife in the garden with her skirts flipped up over her head, and if they didn't see it then they'll lie and say they did. I was impressed with how quickly everyone turned against you," Dilandau laughed coldly, "Your version doesn't matter, it's what her husband says happened and now that their reputation is ruined, I image he will say a number of things."

"Lalai will tell the truth."

"I haven't seen her since you were whipped. I wouldn't be surprised if she were dead."

Migel's hands gripped the reins until his knuckles were white, to stop the shaking in his arms.

"Anyway," Dilandau continued, seemingly oblivious to Migel's shock, "With you, I officially have a combat unit; you only need two. I will show those fuckers in the capital, and we will go to Codibar where the action is."


	12. Chapter 12

12

When the ship bearing Guimel, Migel, and Dilandau from Codibar docked, hundreds of people cheered, brightly colored paper was thrown to them from the rooftops while bands played and voices joined together in jubilant discord in the anthem. Dilandau's success was much lauded at parties and in the popular press. Guimel and Migel were surprised, however, that instead of staying in the huge military complex, they lodged across town near the university and the research compound. Upon their arrival, they were separated from Dilandau. It was strange, after being treated like heroes, that they were led to an unused portion of campus and housed in silent dormitories.

The following day they met Folken. He was introduced as a commander of sorts, someone that sat above even Dilandau despite having no military ranking. He said in many flowery words what a pleasure it would be working with them. Migel liked him immediately; Guimel picked up on Dilandau's ire and distrusted Folken.

Gatti hovered anxiously behind Folken, waiting to be introduced. His uniform was freshly pressed, and Guimel had the distinct impression that Gatti had never tasted real combat. There was something about him that was too polished, Guimel couldn't imaging him slashing is way through a shield wall. At length Folken introduced him as their second-in-command, recently graduated from officer's school and, like them, just arrived back from the battle fields of Codibar where he served as an aide-de camp of the man who rightly should have directed the last two battles.

Gatti ingratiated himself to the other two by paying for a cab to take them to a pub near the military barracks. He set to work immediately; the following day he placed them both on the payroll, a task that Dilandau had neglected. He also set up their widow's accounts, so-called because traditionally war-widows would get an additional three months of military pay. Widow's accounts had three ordered beneficiaries. Migel selected first his father, second a tavern wench named Rose whose delightful acquaintance he made the night prior, and lastly Guimel. Guimel selected his mother and left the other places blank.

After rumor of both Dilandau's victory and the formation his elite strike force, young men began to pour into the capital from all corners of Zaibach. Dilandau gained a reputation for favoring poor boys of no family. Part of Gatti's job was ingratiating himself into the elite Zaibach families as an eloquent boy of good breeding, the spokesperson for the feral military genius. The most he ever had to work to this end was when Dilandau recruited both Dalet and his sister, Biore.

They came from a wealthy family from somewhere in the middle of Zaibach. The patriarch of said family had made his money in the mines, as luck would have it setting up his homestead in earth rich with dragengergists. He bought all the airs of aristocracy that money could buy, but lacked a title. Eager to move up in the world, he had already sent two of his four sons into officer training, where one died in a training exercise and the other was a drunk. Dalet's father was nothing if not pragmatic, and had learned through debuting two daughters that when they came with no title, suitors demanded a substantial price and that was even if they were pretty. Two of his daughters had been obedient to his wishes and developed into lovely, buxom girls, but Biore stood inches above her sisters. Her shoulders were wide, and instead of a yielding demeanor she had a constant scowl. For some reason, instead of playing with dolls and make up, Biore rode horses and played in the woods with her brothers. To insult her into behaving like a girl, her father insisted that she act as Dalet's sparing partner. Perhaps to spite him, she continued to this end, and Dalet, as pragmatic unto his own means as his father, realized that his sister was a better swordsman than him and so he continued the practices.

Dilandau objected strongly to Dalet's inclusion in the Dragon Slayers. Though Folken did not usually attend formal recruitment events and had never been present for what he drily referred to as "gutter fishing", he had insisted on attending Dalet's recruitment. Even if Dilandau hadn't been aware of Dalet's brother's reputation as a sot, I would wager that Folken's interest in the boy played no small role in Dilandau's objections. He demonstrated his skills against Gatti well. Dilandau looked unimpressed. Folken immediately requested his attention privately.

"You are going to accept this boy."

"No."

"Why ever not? Did he not just perform admirably?"

"There is nothing that recommends him. He is in no way different from the boys they use as cannon fodder."

"Ah, I forget," Folken chuckled, "You think that you can dredge the sewer and find Balgus in the slime."

"Well, you think that if I accept this boy into my ranks, he will shit engergists."

"If I wanted the boy's father in my debt, I would take that girl off of his hands and marry her to you, but I'm not a sadist," Folken said slowly, voice crackling with irritation, "They say she's a better swordsman that her brother; I think she would be a most appropriate match." Folken turned and stalked away.

"I do think the engergists would be useful Sir. You've heard the rumors," Gatti said. I had wondered from whom I had drawn this conversation until Gatti spoke. Dilandau nodded and returned to the outdoor pavilion that had been constructed for this purpose. He sidled up to rail and nodded at Dalet, who smiled broadly. This smile quickly cracked when Dilandau requested that he fight his sister.

Even in her dress, Biore bested Dalet twice.

"What talent in this family!" Dilandau announced to Dalet's parents, whose smarmy smiles had been replaced with greenish hues, "We would be lucky to have them both." He had gone too far; every eye turned to him was shocked and disgusted, with the exception of Biore, who stared at the ground trying hard not to smile.

"She will lose her virtue," her mother whispered, but it was so quiet that everyone heard her.

"That's why we're recruiting him too." Dilandau pointed at Dalet. At that point Dalet was so embarrassed and ashamed he wanted nothing more than to die.

The stink of shame still hung in Dalet's nostrils. To compensate, he was brave to the point of foolishness. He still had few friends, so embarrassed was he to essentially be recruited as his sister's warden.

As for the other Dragon Slayers, Viole came from a family of wig-makers, while Yue was promoted to Dilandau's regiment from a different Copper unit. Doman was blue-blooded, but Dilandau had blessed his recruitment after seeing Doman's work with a sword and on horseback. Brocet's family were cousins to the family that ran the bank in Vina and he and Gatti had been childhood friends. Raffio had gotten his start as a mechanic, and proved himself to be the best guymelef pilot. Scout had declined to come to his physical, and little was known about him.

After making my way through the Dragon Slayers, the Vione guardsman started their physicals. On the whole, they were much older than the 'slayers, and generally in less than peak physical condition. I was in the middle of my exam of one who I suspected had rheumatoid arthritis when I heard the hangar door open.

At present we were cloaked, hovering somewhere over Astoria. Folken had had no time for small talk this morning when I bumped into him in the hallway on my way to mess to get my breakfast and he had left on a small aircraft shortly afterward. He likely had just come back, and I needed to ask him about what kind of medicinal plants they used here for analgesics. I knew about willow bark, but I wanted one that wouldn't cause bleeding.

"Jahn, do you mind terribly if I step out? I need to ask Lord Folken something." Jahn looked surprised.

"His airship isn't due back until several hours from now." We shared a mutual look of confusion and he grabbed for his helmet and sword.

We ran into the hangar together. The red guymelef was poised at the very edge of the flight deck. Gatti, Migel, Chesta and Raffio stood at the railing.

"I will bet a month's wages that he misses," Chesta said, not taking his eyes off of the machine.

"The crima claw isn't graded to be accurate at this distance, but we adjusted the deployment speed before he suited up." This from Raffio, the mechanic.

"You're on, Chesta. He's a crack shot when he's pissed," Migel said, "And whatever Raf said. Deployment speeds and such."

"What if he starts the war right now?" Raffio breathed.

"Making that hit would be impressive," Gatti said.

"Who is he trying to hit?" I asked. The four turned to look at me for the first time. Chesta and Raffio looked distinctly embarrassed because of the physical yesterday.

"Lord Dilandau is trying to end the war before it begins by assassinating the rebel king Van Fanel," Gatti answered primly after a pause. He really was excellent at making Dilandau's behavior seem rational.

I found my own spot on the railing, having soured the gambling atmosphere. Dilandau took aim. Raffio took one deep breath through his teeth and held it. He had a lot riding on this.

The shot fired with a hiss. I could just make out the sunlight flashing off metal before it was gone. Steam began to issue from the machine and the whole of the hangar became unbearably hot. The Alsedies began to smoke and the right arm fell to the ground with a clang.

"Mother fucking son of a whore!" Dilandau screamed on dismounting. Migel and Chesta backed away and immediately fled the scene. Raffio looked pale and green. Gatti looked nervous but remained where he was. Dilandau shouldered past him down the hall.

"What the hell are you looking at?" he snapped at me. As soon as Dilandau was out of sight, Raffio went over to the big red machine, now slumped on the ground but changing from a grey color back to red. He began to crawl all over the machine with a wrench held in his teeth.


	13. Chapter 13

13

"Excuse me, Folken? May I pick your brain about something?" I asked, ambushing Folken in the hall after I had heard the ship dock.

"This really isn't the most convenient time. Perhaps later." This was very curt for Folken; he didn't even stop to speak with me as he stalked by. Folken always walked fast, but when he was in a hurry it was nearly impossible to keep up with his long stride. He walked with a slight dip to the left side with every other step, this was more pronounced as he hurried down the corridors.

"DILANDAU!" he bellowed once we entered the mezzanine above the gymnasium. The Dragon Slayers paused in their exercise; many jumped to attention. Dilandau did not. He slowly concluded two more bench presses and stretched languidly.

"Yes?"

"What the hell were you thinking?" Folken stormed down the stairs to the gymnasium floor, his black cloak billowing out behind him.

"Thinking about…?" Dilandau made little circles with his hand, feigning confusion.

"You know very well what I'm talking about." Folken had lowered the register of his voice to a growl. He drew himself up to his full height and made a point of looking down his nose at Dilandau, the shorter of the two by perhaps four inches.

"Emperor Dornkirk, in his last missive, instructed us to take out the Dragon. Had it not been for that girl I would have succeeded." Folken's left hand twitched and he thought about the satisfaction of feeling the cartilage of Dilandau's nose break under his fist.

"You can't just assassinate people," he hissed through clenched teeth. Dilandau's response was unnerving. A huge grin, more rictus than actual smile, spread over Dilandau's face, made all the more terrifying by the sutures that still held his cheek together.

"You think that by saving him you will alleviate your guilt for ordering the razing of Fanelia."

Hatred burned darkly in Folken's eyes. His was a menacing calm, like the dropping of air pressure just before a thunderstorm.

"You cannot possibly understand. Do not act without explicit orders or I will send you back to the sorcerers in the capital faster than you can blink. And do not test me on this; you know nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see you in a cage." Folken spun around, almost knocking into me. So upset from the argument, he grabbed my shoulder to steady me with the wrong hand. It felt strange, this very human action being performed by the sharp angles of his prosthesis.

"Dr. Schmidt, would you please come with me?" It was more an order than a request and he directed my shoulders the way he wanted me to go.

We walked without speaking to his office, where he sat down heavily at his desk. I was deeply disturbed, because both men were so angry, I didn't pick up anything from either of them. I had become so used to my little gift at this point that not having all the facts at my disposal was nerve-wracking. I had to get Folken talking.

"Are you ok?" I asked, slipping into doctor-speak. I angled my body closer to the desk and leaned forward. My face conveyed safety and concern. I rested my hand gently on his arm, feeling the warm cords of muscle beneath my fingers.

"I'm fine." A long pause. "It's just been a very long day, and dealing with him can be so trying." I gave him the silence space to wrestle with his fury. Folken kept his head cradled his brow with his good hand, while his right remained clenched, the silver coils that acted as joints stretching, the shaking of these wires betraying his agitation. His right hand, elegant in its engineering, was more in keeping with his refined personality than his left hand. His palm was meaty and his fingers large and blunt. It looked like a hand that should hold shovels, not quills. I poured him some wine after asking for his permission to do so. He sighed deeply and rested his hand flat on the desk; the ivory bones pulled straight as the springs released their tension. Folken, master of his emotions once more, smiled gratefully at me.

"How long have you had make excuses for him?" I asked, voice full of empathy. Dance for me.

"A few years now. It has never gotten easier, but I think we have both learned at this point how far we can push each other."

"What did you mean by sending him to sorcerers?" I asked, hoping I wasn't overplaying my hand.

"There was a program, put in place long before I got there, that adopted orphan children and trained them," he lied, "Anyway, there were aspects of the program that I disagreed with and I lobbied to shut it down. Several years later they debuted him in a commanding role for the Dragon Slayers. As the Dragon Slayers function more as a strike force than a normal regiment, it was felt that someone with my particular skill set and knowledge base would be of use." There were elements of truth here but it wasn't the whole story. I couldn't quite get my fingers around the edges.

"And ever since then my life has been constant bickering with this man-child with a sword." Folken smiled, his wide mouth magnifying this small expression to light up his angular face. It graced his features so rarely that I knew that his anger was finally and firmly set aside for the evening.

"Can't you just pull rank?"

"Dilandau has never responded well to that, and to be frank, I do not have a military ranking so they made one for me."

"You didn't have any military experience before this?" Prying, prying. Folken put his wine down after taking a deep draught, his tongue passing quickly over his lips in a self-conscious gesture.

"Tell me about the Mystic Moon. I would enjoy the distraction."

It was a deflection, but I could parley with an exchange to make him more comfortable about giving me what I wanted. I talked about my family and the fields of feed corn under the bowl of the endless Dakota sky. I talked about the quads and libraries of the university, the smell of stale urine and beer that haunted the stadium. He was justifiably shocked that a girl would be able to both train as a physician and walk unescorted down a street like Frat Row. We talked about pagers, America Online, and the Super Bowl.

It took two bottles of wine, but Folken finally began to open up about Fanelia. Had we met as teenagers and gone to high school together, there was no doubt in my mind that we would have held hands in the dark of a movie theatre and spurned events like the Prom as too plebian. From where I sat at age twenty-three, he had been a moody, pedantic teenager and it was easy to see how to his traditionalist father would have found Folken's self righteous diatribes grating. That said, Folken's father had been similar at that age. He undertook a quest and discovered his bride. The weight of the crown had been too much though, and a marriage to a woman he had found in the wood as opposed to a match that could have improved the postage-stamp sized country's influence hung around his neck like a millstone. Aside from his angular face, Folken did not favor his father. It was an open secret that Folken's father viewed Varie as a seductress and his son a weakling born of witchcraft, if he was his father's issue at all.

As a teenager, Folken finally stood up to his father. His was a philosophical rebellion; he disavowed the old gods, alcohol, and the tradition of dragon-slaying.

"Beast men are not the same as game in the woods!" the King of Fanelia had thundered.

"If beast-men are sentient and can speak and fight in armies, how do we know that dragons aren't different?" Folken asked. Folken's anger cracked like ice and pierced with precision, he never lost his head.

"They are a completely different order of being. Besides, this is our tradition. Without our traditions, we are nothing!"

"It seems to me that this tradition is antiquated, predicated on bloodshed- "

"The only antiquated tradition is that of the eldest son becoming king! Every word out of your mouth since you were a babe has been incessant mewling."

"Well, maybe Van should succeed you then," Folken said quietly, ego smarting.

"That one at least looks like me."

Folken was able to tell me this with a kind of wry smile. He realized fully at this point what a pain in the ass he had been. His father died a few months after this. Folken hadn't even realized that he was sick. He had been so drawn into his own philosophy, and so angry at the man, he hadn't noticed that his father clenched his chest when he walked. His father's death set in motion all of the preparations for Folken's coronation; Folken himself, stunned by his father's death, passively allowed himself to be swept along by the force of tradition as well as by the overwhelming sense of guilt that he had missed something so important. He was a dutiful son who had loved his father, underneath all the bluster, and armed himself to execute the dragon. Setting out, he had no idea if he would be able to kill the thing or not.

The day that he found the dragon was cold and damp. He was feeling sorry for himself, sodden and miserable, indulging in a fantasy where he somehow tamed the dragon. He would bring it home, earning the respect of his father's lackeys when he returned in triumph.

The dragon came at him fast, charging out of a thicket directly at him. It moved too quickly for Folken to see the whole of it, instead he processed it in parts, the emerald scales, blue tongue, and large golden eye with its slit pupil. There was no wisdom there, no trace of sentient being, only hunger. It clamped down on his arm. He remembered the pain of the pressure as muscles and bone were crushed under the force of its jaws, and the burning, electric agony of the venom. In the face of such massive strength he was condemned; there was nothing that he could do, no point in fighting back, escape impossible. The creature wretched his humerus free of his shoulder with a brilliant spray of arterial blood and his last memory before losing consciousness was watching his arm disappear in the creature's maw and down its throat.

Folken paused and took at deep drink of his wine using his artificial arm. I was at the edge of my seat. He topped off my glass and nudged it towards me.

"Take a drink. You look a little pale." I took a sip and shuddered.

"That is one of the most horrifying things I've ever heard."

"I've had a few years to get used to the story." The right side of his mouth twitched up into a smile.

"Were you right-handed?"

"Of course I was. The real tragedy was that my penmanship had been impeccable." His eyes, the color of merlot, danced as I laughed. Were we flirting? I was drunk enough that I didn't care.

"So how did you get that piece of hardware?"

"When I awoke, I was in a room full of bright lights. Every part of my body was sore, but I was alive. And I owe that to Emperor Dornkirk."

He then discussed with zeal how, with his aptitude towards what he termed "natural philosophy", he was made a sorcerer at an age considered unprecedented. At this point, I recognized that in Zaibach, sorcerers functioned more as PhDs and less like wizards in conical hats, though they did seem to believe in destiny and some kind of magic.

"I studied alchemy, and with subjects like Dilandau, we began to elucidate the basic science of fate alteration." The words "fate alteration" had slipped out of Folken's mouth before he had the chance to call them back, and he deeply regretted the sentence he had uttered.

"What's fate-alteration?" Folken sighed at my question, disappointed that he had consumed more wine than he had intended. He never would have been so careless otherwise.

"Dilandau has proven to be a very interesting individual, from a scientific perspective," he said primly, each word lightly spiked.

"That's an understatement!" I couldn't help laughing, I was buzzed. Folken cracked a smile.

"I still don't understand how he is in a commanding role. He seems so unstable."

"That's an interesting story," Folken began, tenting his fingers together, encouraged by my laugher. The night could end in a companionable fashion, despite his careless choice of words earlier. I chose to let that bit of knowledge slide through my liquored-up brain. This was the most normal I had felt in a while, and my curiosity was raging.

"You understand how there is the Copper army, the Iron army, et cetera? Well, there is another branch that is involved in more, shall we say, secretive matters."

"Spies."

"Exactly. Dilandau had originally been involved in this branch. Though I am not sure what his exact functionality entailed." This was a lie.

"At one point, he caused a bit of a scandal and was sent to a rural corner of Zaibach for memories to fade. Dilandau, for all his faults, is quite bright when he choses to be, and he knew that two soldiers are enough for a combat unit. He returned with a soldier under him, I think it was Migel actually, and then he was sent to Codibar. Now Codibar-"

"Is a small island used to test Zaibach strength against Basram. I know." I said, hurrying him along. Folken looked suprised that I knew. Idiot. I'd have to be more careful.

"Gatti told me," I lied.

"Dilandau went over to Codibar to gather intelligence about the enemy. At some point, the commanding officer in Codibar was killed, and my understanding is that there was not a clearly designated second in command. Indeed, I think there were two blue blooded aristocrats of equivalent rank who had never had any real command responsibilities before. While that was being sorted out, Dilandau appeared and announced that he was taking over. Because his particular branch operates in complete secrecy, this was never questioned. He took control and won two decisive battles. But Dilandau was too aggressive. The second engagement was bought with many Zaibach lives, too many, and it was deemed appropriate that he continue in a commanding role, particularly now that everyone knew who he was, as long as he had a sort of advising officer."

"You."

"That's correct. I'm not sure what I'm doing penance for, but at this point I think I must be redeemed." I yawned, suddenly sleepy.

"You are tired; I've kept you too late."

"That's ok. I'll see you tomorrow." He stood up as I did and opened the door for me. He thought about placing his hand on my hip, of having a lingering kiss at the doorway, but I set off down the hall alone before he had the chance to decide, feeling fully the more-than-three glasses of wine I had consumed.

As I rounded a corner, I was grabbed from behind. A hand clapped over my mouth and my teeth closed over leather. I was lifted off of my feet. I struggled, acutely aware of my weakness.

"I thought you were smarter than that," Dilandau breathed into my ear, tsking softly.

"Let me go, I'm gonna scream." It was hard to say the words with my jaw held shut.

"No, you won't." Dilandau said, putting me down and releasing his hold on my mouth. He grabbed my shoulder and held it painfully tight, steering me into the empty conference room. It was the one where Folken usually ate breakfast with big windows that now let in feeble starlight. He shut the door and let me go. I stumbled back, tripping over a chair. With my weakness and level of intoxication, he easily had the advantage over me.

"What do you want?" I hissed, sounding braver than I felt.

"I had thought, being a witch, that you would know better than to put your trust in a betrayer."

"I'm not a witch."

"It appears we all are a just little misunderstood, aren't we?" Dilandau chuckled.

"I know about Folken. I know that he was a prince of Fanelia and you and your troops destroyed it."

"That is only one of many betrayals. You should be doubly careful, Folken is also a collector of oddities."

"I'm not an oddity." I regretted the words as soon as I said them.

"You have the Sight," he sneered, "and you have not chosen to divulge this to Strategos Folken. Your instincts are right, even though they betray you."

"If you hate me so much, why haven't you outed me?"

"Because it does not suit me to do so yet."

"You wouldn't dare," I said. He laughed and turned to leave.

"Girl, this is Gaea. Your life doesn't matter."


	14. Chapter 14

14

I spent much of the next day in my office. I tidied up my notes from the previous day's examinations; I pursued some of my side experiments. This included several pieces of bread that lay next to the window, an infantile first attempt at penicillin. It was in many ways an ideal sort of day for me, a day full of silence. It allowed me to process through everything that happened the night before.

Dilandau was right on two counts. The first was that when I really thought about it, though I liked Folken, I didn't trust him. He lied so fluently that if I didn't have my little gift, I wouldn't even suspect. The second was that as an American, a woman and a doctor, I fully thought that no harm would come to me. That, should my life become jeopardized, a bunch of Navy Seals would kick down the door and rescue me. That the embassy would be outraged. But Dilandau was right. No one would care. I had left earth in that embarrassing suicide attempt that still made me feel uncomfortable the think about, and there was no one here who would notice that I was gone.

My only disturbance that day was Folken, who was kind enough to bring me lunch and to update me on the day's events while I ate. He explained that he had confronted King Aston on harboring a fugitive. They were awaiting his reply but it wasn't his response that so interested Folken. The goal had been to make Aston, a cautious man, uncomfortable with Van's presence and to cast him back into the open again.

Predictably, the Escaflowne made its appearance that evening and Dilandau was dispatched alone to deal with it. The window of my room had the best view of the ensuing flames.

The day before Migel was shot down there was a kitchen fire. The fire happened in between meals, so the only person injured was a thirteen-year old boy, employed to clean the kitchen. He was carried between two Vione guards and was deposited on the gurney. He was pulseless. I started compressions. The guards had inched towards the door, but I needed them to help. I wasn't strong enough to do it for more than 2 minutes. I started them on the boy's chest.

"What happened?" I asked as they took over compressions.

"There was a kitchen fire."

"Yes, but what happened?"

"I think he was cleaning the oven and there was a spark. It sounds like there was a small explosion while he was inside. We had to pull him out." I recognized the reedy voice of Jahns. This explained why most the burns were on the boy's face. His bronchus would be inflamed and scarred. There was no way I could bring him back, at this point his only hope was that his young heart would start again. This was unlikely without epinephrine. His lungs weren't moving air. I though about putting in a chest tube, but it seemed futile. They kept going for fifteen more minutes, but there was nothing that could be done. I pronounced him then.

It completely rattled me, bringing home that I had almost nothing in the way of medication-I didn't even have an EKG. He was so young. When word reached Folken, he came down to make sure that I was ok. I asked for him to leave. Otherwise I spent the day with my head in my hands, feeling powerless, staring at the place where the boy's body had been. I didn't go to bed until late, but once down I did not awaken until the next afternoon. I think the bells that summoned the boys to battle may have stirred me briefly, but I clung to sleep stubbornly. There was no point in getting up. I kept dreaming that something was lost, first a family dog, then my badge at the hospital, and finally it was me in a dream version of Madison, full of winding streets and falling leaves.

When I finally did decide to get up, it was close to midnight. The Vione hummed with energy, unusual at this time of night. Everyone was still awake. Drawn to the energy, my feet led me to the conference room. Guimel was pacing outside. He nodded briefly at me and continued his laps, nervous and itching to take action. I didn't pause to try to read his thoughts; he was distressed and his mind moved fast. Inside the conference room, Dilandau and Folken stood near a map of Freid tacked to the wall, talking in hushed tones. Gatti and Viole stood opposite of them, awaiting orders. Gatti looked wretched, pale with deep bags under his eyes, staring off miserably.

Migel. Something happened to Migel.

"I don't see why we are wasting our time talking. We should be suiting up now!" Dilandau slammed his hand on the conference table.

"We are not at war with Freid-"

"Yet!"

"We are not at war with Freid. Extracting him will take diplomacy. We must only hope that Migel keeps his head about him and reveals none of our plans," Folken intoned. The contrast between the two was striking, Folken tiger-like in his elegant conservation of motion, while Dilandau moved constantly like a wolf scenting blood.

"Migel won't break." While I never got very clear pictures from Dilandau, behind his words were memories of Migel as a soldier, as a lieutenant, and as the fugitive boy he had rode with from the farthest tip of Zaibach to the capitol city. Dilandau was proud of him.

"Good." Folken said this placatingly. There was a knock and Chesta burst in, carrying several large rolls of parchment.

"The maps you requested, Lord Dilandau," he said, dumping them on the table. Dilandau pounced on them, red eyes darting as his quick fingers rifled through the maps, smoothing the sheets.

"Dilandau, why did you request maps?" Folken asked, irritated.

"In case your brilliant plan fails."

"Dilandau, he will be kept under the highest security that Freid can provide-" Dilandau opened his mouth to speak, "And you are no longer an assassin." Viole and even Gatti, who stood staring at the table as though he were made of stone, looked surprised at Folken's bald statement. There was a slight hiss, like air from an uncorked bottle and audible only to me, as long-held suspicions were confirmed.

Dilandau smiled and met each of their gazes, boldly claiming his murky past.

"I actually have a better spy in my employ than you," Folken said, baiting, "Viole, please come here." He whispered Viole's orders to him. He nodded, adjusting his glasses as he left.

Folken sat heavily at the table and tented his fingers, waiting. He gestured for me to sit beside him.

"I don't understand what she is doing here." Dilandau shot me a furious look and turned back to the maps, occasionally looking out the window and counting on his fingers.

"With weather this fair they will be in Godashem in 3 hours or so," Folken said, as Dilandau was clearly calculating time. Dilandau paused, looked at the map again, nodded. He sank into the seat across from Folken and myself. He drummed his fingers on the table.

"Gatti, get me some wine," he ordered. Gatti bowed stiffly and left the room.

We sat in silence. Dilandau had twisted in his chair, staring out the window as he played with the stem of his wine glass. This wine was abrasive, cherries, leather and tannin. I hooked my bootheels on the rung of my chair, feeling that Migel's capture was somehow my fault because I had been asleep. I hoped that nothing bad would happen to him. I thought him; his arms would be bound, unfamiliar countryside racing below his feet, carrying him closer to the place where he would die. I took a big gulp of my wine. I was catastrophizing because I was nervous, Dilandau and Folken clearly had some kind of plan. He would come back.

"He won't talk," Dilandau declared into the silence, as though he and Folken had been in the middle of discussing this.

"It's not a matter of willpower, unfortunately. You have heard of Plaktu?"

"Who's that?"

"He is a priest, a master of hypnotic suggestion. I wager he is already on his way to Godashem now." Dilandau's eyes narrowed, sparking embers behind black lashes.

"We need to go shoot that ship down," he said quietly, furiously. Behind him, the wall bulged out for just a second. I stared at it, now completely flat and unmoving, and glanced over at Folken, smirking in the direction that had caught my gaze.

"Zonghi," he called. As I watched, a face pulled out of the wall where I had been staring, the white paint of the wall sculpting out cheekbones, chin, and teeth, with big empty holes where eyes should be. A neck and shoulders followed as the texture of the wall sunk into smooth white skin, striped with a deep red, almost black color that shimmered and pulsed like light on water. The room smelled like sour milk and dead animals. The scream that had been stuck in my throat was overcome by the need to gag. Dilandau clapped his hands over his mouth and nose with his left hand, his right reaching for his blade as he leapt up.

"What's that smell?" he exclaimed. My eyes burned and watered from the odor. The creature, covered in fine, fish-like scales in ghost white and deepest red, stood at least six and a half feet tall. I would call it skeletal in thinness, but I had the distinct impression that this creature was not made from bones, but something much softer. It fell to its knees, making no sound as it hit the floor.

"I live to serve you, my lord," it hissed. The voice was thin.

"Why am I not surprised that you would employ a doppelganger?" Dilandau kept his sword drawn.

"Dilandau, you will intercept Plaktu's ship and get Zonghi on board. And Zonghi, once you are there, you will overtake Plaktu. You will interrogate Migel and have him implicate Allen Schezar. Bereft of allies, the Escaflowne will fall easily into our hands. I wouldn't be surprised if the Duke made a gift of it," Folken said with a low chuckle.

"I will do as you command lord," Zonghi said.

"No. Absolutely not," Dilandau said at the same time.

"Do you want Migel to live?" Folken asked. Dilandau took a deep breath, ground his teeth.

"Very well," he said, stalking out of the room, "But there is no honor in this, Strategos."


	15. Chapter 15

15

Migel was dead. It was apparent immediately. I had been waiting with my gurney and the other Dragon Slayers had posted vigil with me; subdued and quiet, the only sounds cracking knuckles and the clearing of throats. Dilandau got out of his machine first, teeth ground, face set in rage. He unsheathed his sword and sparks flew as he struck it against the metal railing. Chesta had gotten out second, eyes puffy, and finally Gatti glacially dismounted. Gatti had loved him.

He had been drawn to Migel's easy manner and his bright warmth, his presence soothing to Gatti's anxious core. He liked the way that Migel teased, how he made everyone feel important. Migel's utter disorganization drove Gatti mad with irritation, but that would dissolve when Migel would smile and shrug, tossing his brown hair out of his eyes. He had been charged with filing not a few formal requests for reprimand for the fights Migel would get into with soldiers from other units; he intentionally never submitted half of the reports. Gatti never acted on his desires, he never let his guard down enough to give Migel his true heart, because he knew that he would never want it. Even when he had felt it breaking, watching Migel charm yet another vapid barmaid into an upstairs room, Gatti had never let on. And I'd never picked up on it; I'd never even known. I'd been so distracted by how much he looked like Will and by my own attraction to him that I hadn't seen it. And now the light of his world had gone out, and he felt hollow, as though his very soul had been ripped out. His thoughts were frantic and fractured, always returning to the bare fact that the world still turned without Migel in it. He wanted to collapse onto his knees, clutch his head in his hands, and weep.

Dilandau walked quickly to his audience room, dragging Chesta and Gatti with him, determined to explain his actions to Folken on his own turf. We lined up outside the room against the wall. No one spoke.

"Don't you have anything better to be doing?" Folken spat towards us as he threw open Dilandau's door. The door slammed shut and we all leaned closer. It was impossible to hear anything and the boys eventually began to share whispered conjectures. I couldn't hear words, but I followed the conversation just fine.

Folken was livid. Dilandau had overstepped himself, actually _killing_ an operative on his own side. He had gone too far. It was no surprise that he would casually murder. They had, sadly, made him this way, just as Folken had warned them all those years ago. Zonghi was a priceless operative; Doppelgangers were an elusive breed. It had a kind of irony, actually, given that Dilandau had already murdered another of Zonghi's kin. There was no way that they would trust Folken now. And Folken had had a darker dream for Zonghi. Once the war had been won and there was no need for creatures like Dilandau, he had an arrangement with Zonghi, one that would allow for the doppelganger's need to revenge his clan. He would appear to Dilandau in the guise of the black-haired woman, and he would strangle Dilandau in some dark alley of the capital; his body would be dumped in a river and not a soul would mourn him.

In contrast to Folken's ordered and organized ire, from Dilandau I felt only rage. He wanted to world to burn for Migel's death. Folken was right, there wasn't a patriotic bone in his body, but Dilandau was shockingly loyal to his own and this was unforgivable. Migel had been so brave and had survived so much; he deserved better than to be strangled in alley in a capital far from home. I initially thought that perhaps Dilandau had acted out of a sense of justice, but this wasn't so. Migel had been killed by Zonghi, Migel was his soldier, and therefore Zonghi would die. The equation was simple.

I think they would have continued to fight for a while, but Gatti fainted. Chesta immediately threw open the door, looking for me, and dragged me into the room by my arm. Dilandau and Folken stood on either side of Gatti, still staring daggers at each other. I knelt beside him and felt a nice strong pulse as his eyes creaked open, confused, before he tried to throw himself back to upright.

"I'd stay put if I were you," I said quietly, "Chesta get some water please." He nodded and left promptly.

"I think that girl is a witch," Dilandau declared into the silence. I couldn't help it; all the blood drained from my face and my heart drummed in my throat. When I met his gaze, betrayal and fear stamped across it, Dilandau just smiled and raised his eyebrows. He turned back to his chair and table.

Folken, thankfully, saw none of this.

"We have had our suspicions about the girl from the Mystic Moon for quite some time. Is there something you saw that confirms this beyond doubt?" Folken asked. It wasn't me. It was Hitomi. Of course it was Hitomi. I had to stop myself from taking a huge breath of relief.

"Your spy told me, before he died. Migel figured it out, actually." Folken nodded. They were civil now, because I was there.

"This confirms our suspicions about the stealth cloaks."

"My alsedies misfired as well, though we all know how prone to issues that piece of shit is."

"How did it misfire? Do you think the girl had anything to do with it?"

"The crima claw locked up. I couldn't shoot."

"We will have to discuss that with that Dragon Slayer of yours that was a mechanic. He'll know if something malfunctioned."

"Yes. That's all. You can go now."

"I won't forget this, Dilandau. You can be assured that I will report this murder to General Adelphos. You have significantly handicapped our efforts."

"Go to Hell, Strategos." Folken swept out of the room without fanfare, his face drawn and white like a death's head.

"Not you girl. You stay," Dilandau said as I was helping Gatti to his feet.

"Drink lots of water and go lay down," I whispered to Gatti, "I think it was just shock." I squeezed his arm, trying to impart in that gesture that I knew and that I was so, so sorry.

The two times I had been alone with Dilandau, he had snuck up on me and threatened my life. I was very uncomfortable now, standing in the middle of the room while he stared at me from his impressive chair. I felt like I was awaiting sentencing by a mad king.

"Could you have saved him?" I seriously considered this question. My gift was a passive one, I had never tried to actively use it. But I tried to force it out, feeling the edges. Perhaps I could shoot it out like a dart and kill Dilandau, awaiting my reply. I think the only thing that I could reliably do was perhaps scare someone into losing their mind.

"I don't think so."

"What good are you then?" The question was not asked in irritation; he was being pragmatic.

"I don't know."

Following Migel's death, all of the Dragon Slayers were more subdued. At first they were silent and stunned, when Guimel received an envelope with Migel's widow's portion the grieving began in earnest. There was less horsing around in the hall ways, and they went about eating and exercising with single-minded determination fueled by anger. Migel was the first one of their number to die. Of course, Slayers before him had died: one had died in battle just one week after being recruited, the other died of a seizure after he had been with them a month. But Migel had been first. He had been a skilled pilot and insatiable practical jokester. If Gatti was the head of the Dragon Slayers as Dilandau's lieutenant, then Migel was its beating heart. It wasn't the same without him. Dilandau never recognized Migel's death, never discussed it with them. Indeed, he acted much the same as before, though his temper was notably shorter. They resented him for this, though most of them understood that Dilandau was not emotionally equipped to acknowledge their mourning, and Gatti, who normally would have stepped into that void, was consumed with his own grief.

Folken and Dilandau spent a great deal of time in the room with the projector, and Folken's breakfast table was covered with a map of Freid that they argued over. More floating fortresses joined our own. Every time another would join us, I was required to meet the sorcerer on board. Thankfully, Folken was with me at each of these meetings. They treated me the same way that seasoned nurses treat new interns, perhaps rightfully so in both cases.

This took place over the course of three days. In the grey hours of the fourth day, they marched on Freid's capital. The whole city burned; it was barely a contest. This was the first time that I really considered that perhaps I was not on the side of the righteous. There were very few casualties on our side, but one of the seasoned sorcerers made a point of taking me down to the medic tents. Once he had watched me suture, he taught me how to set bones. We also replaced a dislocated shoulder. I slept that night in the main airship as we did not return until just a few hours before sunrise.

Being in a different airship, I stuck to this particular sorcerer, called Mesmen, because I knew no one else. We slept on cots in the medical bay, and I was so nervous and full of adrenaline from my first real battle that I awoke every half hour.

We woke again to the sound of groans. After tending to the sick in the main medical bay, we prepared bandages, splints and suture for the coming battle as the airships sped over the rice fields and rounded hills of Freid. I regretted leaving my morphine on the Vione. That said, I felt proud and territorial about the Dragon Slayers. They had a distinguished reputation amongst the other men; whenever a curious soldier inquired about the airship where I was stationed, their name was enough to silence them into respect. By proxy, it was assumed that I was some kind of special physician.

That next day I was awake for thirty-nine hours. It started in medical bay of the floating fortress where General Adelphos was stationed. We initially were in charge of supplying the speedy air freight with medical supplies and taking injured soldiers in exchange. The soldiers who were sent up from the battlefield were to a man lieutenant or higher, the foot soldiers were left to bleed to death in the mud. In those first hours, I performed my first unsupervised amputation. His leg was blown apart and he was hemorrhaging. I made the decision quickly, had an orderly hold the man down while I sawed quickly. The injury was similar to one I had seen with Mesmen, but I was in terror that perhaps the leg could have been saved. I wanted badly to talk to Mesmen about it, but we were too busy for me to staff each case. Mesmen had disappeared into his operating theater, taking all of the abodminal wounds one after another and leaving me to deal alone with legs and arms and head wounds.

Mesmen grabbed me by the arm and loaded me into one of the transport vessels with the medical supplies, announcing that I was ready for the real battlefield and that he would be joining me shortly. I wanted to ask him about the patients I had seen, to get confirmation that I was actually doing this correctly, but there was no time. The rain soaked me to my bones during the short ride in the open transport ship. The second we landed, medics on the ground opened the protective cage around us and began to furiously unload supplies. I had about three minutes to stand around looking confused. No one asked for my credentials, no one asked if I could even handle this. The level of gore I witnessed around me was unparalleled. But then a soldier with an almost-severed leg was being led into the medical tent. We made eye contact, and I grabbed some alcohol, some bandages, and the bone saw. The rain fell in sheets that day, and I was covered head to toe in mud and blood by the time we had treated fifteen such men.

The battle ended at some point, but in the medic tent we weren't aware of it. Slowly the number of soldiers coming into the camp slowed, so that instead of one every two minutes, it was one every five, then one every fifteen. I sat heavily on a box and raised my hands to my eyes. My hands were the only part of my body that was actually clean-I had made every attempt to try to keep them that way. I rested my forehead in them, and vividly began to have flashbacks. I had already forgotten half of the men that I had taken care of, now it was just the bloodiest, the loudest screams, and the times of doubt before I started cutting into bone, or when I took one look and turned away, the soldier injured fatally and therefore a waste of my time. This morning I had worried about taking a leg unsupervised, by the end of today I was doing my best to cleanse bowel before stuffing it back in and suturing shut, knowing that they were probably going to die either way. A few men had died on my table. I started to tremble uncontrollably from shock. I didn't cry.

I started when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

"Why are you down here?" Folken asked. One hand was on my shoulder, oddly it was the prosthesis. Normally, Folken took great care not to touch me with his artificial limb. In his natural hand, he held some kind of sword with notches in it. It looked old, and unlikely to do any damage in battle. I just looked at him, dazed.

"It's time to go." I followed him as though in a dream. I continued to follow Folken once we landed, tripping on my own feet. The dining hall was jubilant with the sounds of men who had survived. I stopped in the doorway, Folken continued on, that odd sword in his hand.

"Jeture's steaming shit! You're a sight!" Brocet shouted at me. The men howled with laughter. They were all clean, not a scratch on them. Biore was at my side.

"I think you need some of this," she said, pressing a giant mug of beer into my hands. I took a sip. It was dry and malty and I drank half of it in one go.

"Easy does it," Gatti said, as Biore guided me onto the bench at the long table with all of them. He wet a napkin in a full flagon of water and held it out to me.

"No, I think you should leave her like that. She looks much scarier," Chesta quipped. I lifted the water flagon to my face, seeing in the distorted reflection the huge blood smears on my cheeks and forehead and laughed.

"I'm such a mess." We drank and shared our stories, drunk on our survival. We were all so fatally alive in that moment.


	16. Chapter 16

16

I awoke in the morning with a feeling of terror, the dream sublimated with my gasp. I washed methodically, having sweat through my pajamas and changed into the sweater dress that I had been wearing when I came over. I hadn't worn any of my clothes from home in weeks, but this morning I sought the familiarity. There was a chill in the air and the window was framed with frost. I felt homesick for the Novembers of the Dakotas, the wide grey skies above and the few dried stalks of corn below, peaking over the thin dusting of snow.

Folken and I breakfasted in his main receiving room with its huge windows that today looked out over rugged country. I sat in the chair across from the window, remembering for the first time in a long time the morning routine in high school, with dogs barking and that warm sound of plates being stacked, bacon being fried. Folken nudged over a sheaf of papers.

"I can't read these, they're all in Zaibach," I said, more curtly than I intended.

"With time, you will be able to read these documents. They concern the Destiny machine."

"Which is?"

"Emperor Dornkirk has been working on a machine that can alter fate."

"How?" I asked dryly.

"Everyone has a fate. We have meridians that tie us to gravity and Gaea, and these are what influence our destiny."

"Meridians?"

"Yes." Here he showed me a graphic of a homunculus, with circumferential lines. The location of the lines, he explained, were influenced by place, time and month of birth.

"Certain destinies we cannot change. But it may be possible for certain people to change their destiny in accordance to their wishes. We've studies such individuals closely, and worked with the destiny machine to bring destiny in line with individual wishes."

"So, you are saying that when turned on, this machine will allow everybody's agenda to come about? What happens when they conflict?"

"In the ideal future, there will be no conflicting wishes."

"And if things change? Or is the purpose of this machine some kind of mind control? Or do a certain person's wishes weigh more than others?"

"Well- "

"This sounds like it is ripe for abuse. How is this a good idea?"

"I feel that an end to war and suffering is generally a good thing-an outcome that most people throughout time and in all places have desired," Folken said sharply.

"So, did this machine predict me? Was this what made you nab me from my life? And what do my lines look like?"

"It did predict you."

"Sure did a great job," I sneered sarcastically.

"There was a huge shift in energy, before you arrived. Our best sorcerers tried to neutralize it, and somehow you happened. Now that we know the powers of the other girl from the Mystic Moon, we are trying to figure out where you fit in."

"What if it's all a mistake?"

"Why are you behaving this way?" Folken asked exasperated, his hands thrown into the air.

"I just don't get it."

"The destiny machine picked you for a reason. The reason is not clear to me yet. As to your destiny, I'm not sure how to map your meridian lines, given that you are from Earth, not Gaea."

I remained quiet. It occurred to me then that the machine picked me because I was not yet meant to die. And this ability to pick up on thoughts was certainly a new thing since I arrived, an amplified version of the kenning I had back home. But it only gave me memories and the ability to tell if people were lying; I couldn't see through stealth cloaks and make machines malfunction, I couldn't find things that weren't there. Where Hitomi's powers were fantastic, mine were mundane. I didn't feel like I had a purpose here.

"The whole thing is just tilting at windmills. And if you are right, what you are playing with this dangerous." I stood, grabbed another biscuit, and returned to my office. Folken was glad that I left. I was being rude and irritating, "irritating" being the specific word I picked up from him.

That uneasy feeling haunted me. I was jumpy and had a stomach ache, my thoughts full of nostalgia and regrets; specifically, the regret that I had jumped. Maybe it was because of the fight this morning, or perhaps the nightmare that I couldn't remember. It was a misty fall day and I couldn't see the ground that we flew over in pursue of the dragon. Just a ghost ship. We could easily crash, everyone obliterated.

The bells began to ring a few hours before nightfall. Death knell. Where had those words come from? Surely, I was just creeping myself out. I opened my door and leaned against the doorframe as the Dragon slayers sprinted past. Brocet, Viole, Biore, Guimel, Dalet, Chesta. Gatti came last, running slowly. His eyes were haggard, his face pale and drawn. He hadn't looked the same since Migel's death. They got in their guymelefs, led by the one in red, and vanished into the grey. As the last one faded into the mist, my throat tightened. My mouth was dry and my heart pounded.

I couldn't relax so I paced, back and forth. Something terrible was lurking in the mist, something white and made of bones, hungry for souls. The walls closed in around me and to escape my claustrophobic office I went out to the hangar to wait for them. Without thinking, I grabbed the cold railing of the stairs and climbed until I reached the topmost platform. I wanted to pace but resisted the urge; the clanging of my boots on the grating was too loud. I might miss something. The smell of the iron in the wet, the biting cold of the railing in my hands and the dampness of the misty air were elements so impersonal they sought to freeze into dead stillness.

The only ship that came back that day was the red one. They died. Every one.


	17. Chapter 17

17

Dilandau stumbled out of his machine and grasped the nearest railing with the desperation of a drowned man. His arms buckled in and his knees collapsed to the ground. Suddenly, he led out a cry, a strange high keening. It was the saddest thing I had every heard, a raw howl of sorrow. There was fury too, the anger of being abandoned, of being powerless.

He thought about joining them, of descending into the blackness, of running after them hands stretched out desperately, screaming for them to wait for him. Instantly my clinical thinking separated me from him with the quick cold decisiveness. He mustn't destroy himself. I crept down the stairs and ran to get my morphine. He was in the same position when I returned. Still rocking back and forth, still gripping the railing. I slowly approached him, and when he finally heard me he turned. He was angry, but when he saw my expression, his eyes shut quickly, tears matting his dark lashes. This once proud and terrifying warrior was gone, a teenager looked back at me. I'd never realized before, but he couldn't be older than eighteen.

I led him back to his room, tidy and impersonal. He sat on the edge of his bed and held his head in his hands while I reached up and grabbed one of the bottles of wine that lined a shelf. The sound of the cork was unsuitably festive in the mortuary silence. I poured the wine into a glass and crouched beside him.

"Drink this." Without looking at me, he took up the wine and drained it.

"It's your choice. It might help you sleep," I said, holding up the bottle of morphine and the syringe. Dilandau nodded and shrugged out of his jacket, letting it drop in a pile on the floor. He held out his right arm, dark blue vessels twisting up under his translucent skin. I tied the tourniquet, selected a vein, and gave him the injection. He took a deep breath as I released the tourniquet. Moving slowly as though life was leeching out of him as I watched, he took up the bottle of wine and took three more deep draughts. I hoped he didn't overdose from all the sedatives, but for a quick second, I allowed myself to think of that fate as a mercy. He took off the jeweled band he wore on his forehead and flung it across the room. It had been given to him in honor of the battles he commanded in Codibar, and now it mocked him for running in fear while his men died for him.

I stared at the leg of his bed for what seemed like forever, as I tried to come to terms with the fact that they were all dead, and actively blocked the horrifying images that ran around Dilandau's mind. I couldn't carry this with him. Eventually he slept, moving glacially from the edge of the bed to curled tightly on his left side with his head in his hands. Absurdly, it reminded me of tornado drills in my elementary school, where everyone dove under their meager desks and covered their heads. There was something precious and futile about the gesture. I drew up the sheet around him. My vigil here was done for now.

Once outside, I talked to one of the Vione guards with whom I was familiar for his likely rheumatoid arthritis.

"Watch him tonight. He might attempt to take his own life, and this mustn't be allowed to happen." My calm dissipated as I walked away, replaced by a dark terror.

My friends were now nothing, hearts still and blood clotting in veins stiff with death. Gatti was no more, that nervous energy, that dedication to precision, that loveliness that spilled out of him when he allowed himself to relax was gone. I mourned them all, save Guimel. I hoped for Guimel that his faith served him, that his spirit was now traveling over the mountains and swift running rills towards the sea and his beloved Fionna. But I couldn't believe all that. There was no meaning in any of this. And I couldn't be alone right now.

I sought out Folken like a crow to carrion. He sat at his desk in the library and stood when I entered. He sighed when he saw it was me, and gave me a sad smile. I walked slowly across the floor, bypassing the chair across from the desk and instead leaned on his desk next to him.

"Are you alright?" he asked. My eyes stung and I gripped the side of the desk until my knuckles were white. I didn't trust myself to speak so I just nodded. Seeing my distress, Folken stood in front of me. He tilted my chin up, inspecting for tears though I had none. Quickly, before I could change my mind, I flung my arms around his middle. Dilandau's memories pounded into my field of vision, each beat of my heart drove them into my mind like the blow from a battering ram. Folken put his left arm around me, stroking my back with his thumb. He hesitated, wine-colored eyes looking into my own as though asking permission. I rested my cheek against the leather of his uniform and felt the careful touch of his prosthesis, the ivory of his fingers clicking down around my shoulder. He was trying very hard to keep drawing his breath in measured, calm increments.

But Folken wanted me. As much as he wanted to offer me comfort, he was keenly aware of my body pressed against his chest. This knowledge was undeniable and distracted me from the sorrow and the gore. I felt a moment of misgiving, I couldn't use him this way, to play on his innermost desires for my own purposes, so that I would feel in the place of mourning, so that the visions would stop. But I didn't want this paralyzing terror either. My decision was made. With cold intention, I placed my hand on his chest, and slid it between the panels of his jacket, so that my hand rested against the warmth of his bare skin. His breath caught. I moved my hips just a little bit, but there was no misunderstanding. My lips reached up to meet his, and within the span of a minute, or perhaps longer, we were both on the floor, he tugged at my skirt while my fingers fumbled with the buttons of his jacket. He never touched me with his prosthesis.

He slept beside me on the carpeted floor, his breath deep. In sleep, the lines near his eyes relaxed, the tattoos smooth against his skin. My rest had been a fragile one and I don't think that I had been asleep more than twenty minutes. I had dreamed about them, walking in the misty dark. Dalet's head was at an unusual angle, his neck had been broken and he had suffocated inside his machine. Half of Guimel's face was gone but the other half was concerned. Where was Fionna? Gatti, of course Gatti, led them through the dark.

I extracted myself from Folken's arms without waking him, and lay on the floor without touching his skin, staring at the ceiling. Everything felt raw and alien, as though even the hours didn't fit just right. I felt justified in what I had done; I no longer felt that panicked fear that had driven me into Folken's arms. The frantic, stampeding emotions had been locked away. I dressed quickly and left him laying there.

At this time of night, the Vione was completely silent. I walked through the corridors and Jahns, the Vione guard, was still in position across the hall from Dilandau's room. He'd made himself comfortable, sitting in that military issue chair with his helmet resting on the floor next to him. The door was just cracked a little bit. Jahns smiled at me and patted my shoulder, and it was this, not my liaison with Folken, which almost, almost broke me down to tears.

To ensure that the alsedies remained elite, they were programmed to burn once they were shot down. But, as tended to happen, there was a glitch and one of the machines didn't self-destruct. Two of the Vione guards were dispatched just before dawn to set the machine alight. They carried Chesta's body back when they returned and dumped it on my gurney.

I stood over him for a long time. Chesta's eyes wouldn't stay shut; they were dull and looked misshapen. He was stiff from rigor mortis and his skin was waxy. He lost too much blood; his skin mottled only faintly. His chest was caved in at a particular angle and his flaxen hair was plastered to his skull with dried blood. His body was so impressively still, his very deadness like screaming into silence. Folken came in behind me and for a long time said nothing.

"Sarah, I'm so sorry." I wasn't sure whether he was apologizing for Chesta's death or for what we had just done. I had opened my mouth to respond, taking up the corner of the sheet so as to cover Chesta when the force of realization caused me to drop the sheet and shake once, from my crown to my toes. _I foresaw this_. Weeks ago, with his concussion. Weak and nauseated, I fell to my knees, clutching the gurney with my hands. I could have saved him. If I had only listened to my premonitions, I could have saved them all. But I had stayed quiet, and this was the price of my decision.


	18. Chapter 18

18

I joined Dilandau in the mess the next morning. He sat in his customary place at the head of the long empty table. His presentation was immaculate as usual, not a hair out of place. Indeed, he didn't act as though anything at all were out of the ordinary. He drank his coffee and ate his ration of oatmeal, paging through a book of maps without ever so much as glancing at me. Once he finished his coffee he proceeded to the conference room; I followed like a shadow. Was it possible that after everything he was just fine? Was he made of stone? Even I felt like the whole world was upside down and I had only known the Dragon Slayers for a few weeks.

Folken was flustered too; when we took a seat at the large conference table he was clearly at a loss for what to say. He gave me a small smile and nodded his head, wanting to acknowledge that everything was different. He tried to convey to me a deeper level of comfort but also of companionship, that we were together in this tragedy because we had coupled in its aftermath. There was a glass vase of roses in the middle of the table. I'd never seen flowers before on the Vione, and was sickened to realize that they were likely for me. Six roses in garish red, the payment due to one's whore. They were all opened, the petals of a few already curling and beginning to brown. They filled the conference room with the cloying scent of funeral parlors.

Dilandau, oblivious, sat back from the table with his ankle crossed over his knee, clearly trying to project that he was ok and ready for business. Normally, Gatti would have sat at his left hand, taking minutes. The empty chair seemed to take up more space in the room than the three of us combined. It demanded to be acknowledged.

"I think we should take a moment-" Folken began at last.

"I don't think that's necessary. Battles happen and people die," Dilandau interrupted. Folken was taken aback; his eyes met mine to make sure I was as shocked as he was. "You have a dispatch from Adelphos I see. Let's hear it."

"As you wish," Folken sighed, again meeting my gaze as though to say that he disproved of this and that this was further evidence that Dilandau was a soulless murderer. I shrugged, as confused as he was. Dilandau seemed to be handling it better than everyone else. Folken read through the dispatch, a dry document full of troop movements and the bureaucratic details of taking over nations. Adelphos must not have heard about the Dragon Slayers yet.

"No new orders then," Dilandau said once Folken had finished reading the letter.

"No new orders. You should take advantage of this lull and rest."

"Fuck you Folken," Dilandau stood and delicately plucked a rose from a vase at the center of the table and stalked out. Folken sighed and put his head in his hands.

"He seems to be taking it well at least," I observed so that we wouldn't talk of other things.

"This isn't normal. This isn't normal behavior at all."

"For him or for anyone?" Folken cracked a tired smile but I had a cold sensation settle in my belly. Dilandau had reached the decision to swing his legs over the railing and drop the thousands of feet to his death. The thorns of the rose would pierce the leather over his heart, and so adorned, he would spread his arms wide and fall. I pushed up from the table and sprinted towards the hangar.

Dilandau stood several levels below me, leaning against the railing and looking down at the glittering ocean and emerald coastline below us. He twirled the flower in his hands.

"What a stupid way to die. There's no glory for them. Viole, Dalet, Guimel, Gatti. All dead. What a waste." He threw the rose over the side of the railing and watched it fall. He suddenly clenched his head in his hands, his fingers viciously pulling at his hair.

"Go away!" he screamed to no one; his voice echoed in the empty hangar, "Stop it! I don't care if you're sorry! It's over, nothing can bring them back! Everyone is gone! I'm alone again." I started to race down the stairs towards him. Who did he think he was talking to?

"I'm alone. Why does this keep happening to me? Celena!"

Dilandau was drenched with sweat and every muscle quivered. He didn't see the hangar, instead his eyes were full of nightmare images. I saw Guimel's guymelef dismembered and heard his screams. I felt the crush of horses around me as I crawled up a mountain of the dead, sword clenched so hard in my right hand that it felt like it was a part of me. I met the eyes of the man on the other side of the bodies before I ran him through with my blade. I felt the lick of flames as everything around me burned, but also their protection and power. Finally, no one could hurt me. Men awoke as I slit their throats with long daggers, their wives wept as I shoved the blades under their ribs. I saw a little girl kneeling on the floor of a prison cell screaming. I was always the only one that lived, Death's witness again and again and again.

The rest of the day Dilandau was catatonic. He lay on his bed, staring at the wall and occasionally twitching. He didn't speak or eat, but he wasn't asleep. When I tried to reach out to him at one point, meaning only to convey some small comfort by a gentle touch of his shoulder, he grabbed my wrist with his left hand and he threw me onto the floor.

"Dilandau stop it!" I screamed but there was no trace of recognition in his eyes as he straddled my stomach and lifted up my shoulders, slamming my head into the floor. He shoved his knee into my abdomen and I choked breathlessly. I tried to scratch him but he took up both my wrists in one hand and punched me in the face. My nose began to bleed and I couldn't open my eyes, but I was suddenly conscious that his weight had been lifted off. Three Vione guards and Folken pulled him off of me. Folken knelt beside me, offering me a handkerchief for the blood pouring down my face. Dilandau screamed as he was bound hand and foot to his bed. I was in a complete state of shock. It was like he wasn't even there, almost killing me was a reflex. Murder and survival were so deeply ingrained him that when he felt threatened, muscle memory took over in violence that was mechanical, automatic.

When I evaluated Dilandau the next day, he spoke in gibberish and walked the confines of his small room like a manic. Instead of pacing like a tiger he moved in light, abrupt jerks like a spider, all of his terrible, muscular grace gone. His eyes were haunted, Armageddon moons over deep purple and green shadows. He never slept, but never seemed fully awake. I took to sleeping in a chair across from his door, open at all times and guarded by two men. I would occasionally doze off in the chair, only to wake to find Dilandau standing directly across from where I sat, staring at me with dead eyes. Sometimes he would scream for hours.

Other than giving him sedatives regularly, I was completely out of my depth. No Seroquel, no Haldol. All I could do was set the guards on him to watch him to make sure he didn't hurt himself, which despite this he still managed to do with distressing frequency. He cut himself on wine bottles, he stabbed forks into his hands.

I slept when I could, paging through Harrison's and the Zaibach textbooks whenever I wasn't with Dilandau to see if there was some weed or mineral that they gave to the mad. I was afraid to use the St. John's wort; I could make him worse if this was mania.

Folken came to my office on the fourth day. He shut the door behind him.

"You've been avoiding me." I looked up from my stack of books, papers, and partially filled mugs of old tea. I knew that my hair was sticking up in all directions and that there were pronounced bags under my eyes. The bruises from where Dilandau had hit me were just beginning to turn a sickly yellow-green.

"I've been a little overwhelmed," I said tersely, gesturing to my mess.

"I'm sorry if I-" he began but I stood and began to noisily drag a chair across from my desk, drowning out his words. Folken gave up trying to speak and clenched his jaw shut. His eyes narrowed; he was trying to do the right thing. But I didn't want to talk about it; I couldn't even look at him without feeling ashamed. It happened because I needed to be distracted, because it hurt too bad to think that we had lost the Dragon Slayers. It had been as necessary at the time as an antibiotic. I wasn't his lover and I wasn't his whore. I owed him nothing.

"Look, we can talk about that later. The most pressing thing right now is that Dilandau is psychotic and I don't know how to fix him."

"Of course. Always Dilandau," Folken growled under his breath.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. The wheel ever turns," Folken said angrily, waving his hand in dismissal, "If you are out of your depth, we need to get him back to the sorcerers in the capital."

"Ok." I said this with a big sigh of relief that we might be getting him back to people who might be able to help him.

"I will contact the convoy and arrange a rendezvous with an airship heading back to the capital." Folken spat from behind gritted teeth, sweeping out of the room.

I only had to keep Dilandau alive until the arrival of people who actually knew what the hell they were doing.

We gave Dilandau an injection of sleeper flower, which he accepted meekly without needing to be held down. He slept heavily after. Even so, Folken stayed in the room with me while I set about to packing up his belongings. The room was spartan, and I was surprised at the number of empty drawers.

Earlier that week, the Dragon Slayers' rooms had been cleared out. They had small figurines of deities, letters from girls, novels, packs of cards and cigarettes. Gatti had volumes of correspondence from his mother; Guimel had a lady's necklace with a small green stone. Brocet and Dalet between them had enough off-duty garb to clothe the entire unit. Viole had drawings made by his daughter. The seemingly inconsequential detritus that they left behind spoke of the men they were: dutiful sons whose mothers were so proud, handsome young men who promised to be true to society girls at court balls.

Dilandau's room, in contrast, had no personal artifacts. I don't know what I was expecting to find, given leave to go through his belongings. Perhaps perfumed letters from the black-haired woman, a chess board, something, _anything_ personal. But the books stacked in vertical towers on his desk were all books of maps or military strategy, full of diagrams of bars with swinging arrows. The left corner of his desk was worn, from where he had rested his boots on it, tilting backward in the chair. There was no ornamentation, the only color came from a purplish stain on the wall opposite of his desk. Folken had not been as surprised as I at the utter lack of personality in Dilandau's room; in his mind, Dilandau was not sophisticated enough for art. His closet contained two jackets, three pairs of pants, and exactly seven undershirts. His scabbard hung from a peg in the closet. I stole a look at his bed; he was still sleeping deeply.

I wanted badly to hold it and I didn't care if Folken judged me for it. I lifted the leather belt off of the peg, surprised at its weight. Folken watched this without comment. From Folken's mind I gained the vocabulary to describe the weapon. The scabbard was not decorated other than a chape of iron at the tip and an unembellished iron locket. There was a steel ring at the end of the hilt and the grip was brown leather, shiny with wear and long enough for the weapon to be used with two hands. I rested the scabbard on the side of cupboard and drew the weapon out. It was too heavy for me to hold in one hand. The blade, when viewed down its length, was diamond shaped with a hungry sharp edge on the curved face. It was actually quite dull on the convex side, particularly near the hilt. The cross guard, in fact, was almost flush with the blade on the convex side. Folken leaned over and extracted the weapon from my grasp, holding it up in his left hand. He paused for just a second as our hands touched; this was the first physical contact we had made since that night. He looked closely at the blade to avoid looking at me.

"It's just a standard-issue number 5," he said quietly, lecturing, "Some blades are made with much more art." He gestured to the hilt of his own sword, which had a green jewel in the round pommel, a cross guard covered in elegant scrollwork, and the grip in leather and filigree.

"The number 5 is the preferred design of Zaibach armorers, better for slashing but also capable of serving as a thrusting blade." He took my silence as encouragement to continue. He made silent arcs with the blade through the air, "Of course, this is a right-handed sword." He flipped the sword around in his hand, so that the duller convex edge faced me.

"This is for bad habits," Folken explained, hooking his finger over the cross guard so that it rested on the dull metal surface and thrusted the sword towards me. The flat of the blade rested on my shoulder as the point whispered past my ear.

"His technique is atrocious. One of the reasons I selected Gatti as his second was that Gatti was beautiful with a sword. He had trained with the best masters from an early age, while Dilandau got his start learning on daggers and knives. I thought he would be able to work on Dilandau's technique, but to this day, I think if Dilandau had to chose between them, he'd pick a dirk every time. He does much better with a bastard sword, made for stabbing at close quarters and completely lacking in elegance. He usually molds the crima claw after a bastard sword."

"Oh. I'd gotten the impression from the Dragon Slayers that he was pretty good." Folken chuckled.

"The majority of the Dragon Slayers hadn't seen a sword in their lives until they joined up. He is fearless, I will give him that much, whatever his other faults. He disregards the rules of conduct completely and fights like a cutpurse in an alley."

I objected to this description of Dilandau's fighting style. Now that I had held his sword, I was even more impressed that he often used the blade one handed. He would usually practice against two of his Dragon Slayers at once, and once he got his blood up, his sword became part of his body. He was never still and moved with terrifying fury, as menacing as a tornado, his balance as perfect as a dancer's.


	19. Chapter 19

19

The airship arrived the next afternoon. I had packed up Dilandau's armor and his sword, laying them in a trunk beside the more useful medical textbooks, my operating tools, the vials of morphine and my sneakers. I thanked Jahns for his help. The sorcerers had already grabbed Dilandau by both arms and were leading him into the airship. Just as the great chains connecting the two airships were released, Folken ran down the causeway towards me.

"Sarah!" His hand was outstretched towards me. His voice was firm and spoke in tones of command

"Where are you going? You are to stay here with me!" he shouted.

"My patient-"I gestured vaguely to Dilandau. In reality, I was running away from Folken. I didn't ever want to have the conversation of what we were. If I followed Dilandau, I never had to relive that embarrassing moment again. I would reinvent myself, find another assignment on a different airship. Leave the dead Dragon Slayers and the silent mess hall, leave the library and its secrets. Meeting his livid and betrayed gaze just briefly, without expression I turned and ascended into the airship.

I followed Dilandau and the guards. This airship was much smaller and built for rapid transport. They led us to a small office where a sorcerer was sitting at a desk, with two more waiting. When Dilandau saw the sorcerers, he began to scream. Though the guards holding him were strong, Dilandau slipped their grip and ran directly into me. I don't think his mad red eyes saw me at all. It was just enough of a delay that one of the sorcerers was able to inject his thigh with some kind of medicine and Dilandau immediately slumped to the ground unconscious.

The two sorcerers on the side of the room quickly swept to his side.

"Take him to the containment area, and inject as he needs it. I feel that once he is safe in a cage, he will leave well enough alone." This was from the sorcerer sitting at the desk. He had similar tattoos on his head to Quentain, but his skin was so dark it was hard to see them. He was a few years older than me, and incredibly good looking. He was also rude, and as soon as everyone but me left, he returned to the letter at his desk.

"What did you give him?" I asked.

"A sedative," he replied tersely.

"Obviously. But what was it?" He said nothing. "Can I have some?" He finally looked up at me, and carefully surveyed my clothes, a Zaibach dress and my Doc Martin boots.

"My apologies, " he said, not sounding at all sorry, "I hadn't realized that you were a person of some import. Please sit down."

I sat, suddenly uncomfortable as he visually dissected me. Having him actually see you was like being under the gaze of a tiger with your back pressed against a wall.

"I've heard from the dispatches that you are the girl from the Mystic Moon, yes?"

"Yes."

"Mesmen was impressed with you at Fortuna." I shuddered, remembering that day.

"Would you be willing to let me interview you about the Mystic Moon?" he asked.

"Yes."

He asked me a variety of questions, from how many siblings I had to how far Fargo was from the equator. He wrote down all of my answers. It was so different from the easy conversation over wine with Folken. I felt deeply uncomfortable as soon as I thought about Folken. He wasn't so bad, was he? Did I make a huge mistake leaving him, in favor of these clinical strangers and a mad man? I allowed my mind to wander for just a second, mechanically answering the sorcerer's questions. What would it have been like to be Folken's girlfriend? Would we eat breakfast together, share his bed? Would the darkness in him dissipate if he felt cherished? But in all of these experiments there was one variable that I couldn't change: I didn't love him.

I felt inside out at the conclusion of my interview with the sorcerer, whose name was Martien. I stumbled over to a large room with two guardsmen standing outside it. It looked like an operating theater. Dilandau was strapped to the table, bound hand and foot. He was snowed-too drugged to make sense and not agitated. I asked the junior sorcerer in charge of watching him some basic questions about the sedative, which was not from sleeper flower, but a different plant altogether.

We arrived in Zaibach's capital city by evening. The Emperor's palace was huge and dwarfed everything around it. The entire city spread out from the palace. The light pollution was so bad that the sky was a pinkish orange, and once we landed the air was caustic, dry and chemical. They immediately separated me from Dilandau. There was a group of sorcerers with a gurney, as well as a large bipedal afghan hound in armor. I made to follow Dilandau but Martien grabbed my arm and led us towards another group. They greeted me with honor and talked over me, about me, sweeping me into a carriage and slamming the door behind me. Martien shared the answers that I had given him earlier as the Zaibach sorcerers peppered us with questions. When I tried to answer for myself, Martien talked over me, holding up his hand. Eventually I gave up and stared out the window. Leaving the Vione had been a huge mistake. I was actually homesick for my small room, for the guards, many of whom I knew by name, for Folken's protection. I was homesick too for the Dragon Slayers, and remembered with a punch to the gut that they were all dead. The rest of the ride I was in shock, clenching my arms across my stomach. There was little of Zaibach's capital to see because of the dark, though I caught little glimpses of gritty buildings as we drove past flickering yellow lamps, the occasional vagrant, clothed in grey rags reaching towards the carriage.

Eventually we reached our destination and Martien threw open the door. They surrounded me as we climbed a stone stairway into a large square building. There was no trace of the carriage that carried Dilandau. Once inside, they took me downstairs, turning on cold blue lights as we went. They gestured to a chair, held down my arm, and drew blood. They led me to a dorm room with numerous bunked beds, all without occupant; I found a bunk and quickly hopelessness dragged me down to sleep.

The next morning, at least I think it was morning because I had no clocks or windows, I waited for about an hour to see if they would come back for me. The growling of my stomach was getting hard to ignore, so I tried the door to find it unlocked. I was able to find my way back out to a main stair and aimlessly wandered. The top two floors were locked, but the next level down wasn't. It was a hallway that contained mostly offices. The building had the feel of a repurposed university building, worn old stone and new features, like drinking fountains, tacked on without regard for aesthetic. Up here, there were bulletins on the walls. I recognized some of the time nomenclature that Gatti had taught me. A tiny sorcerer opened the door near me and nearly shrieked in fright when he saw me. He was young, younger than me, and did not have the full head tattoos of more senior sorcerers.

"I'm sorry," we said at the same time. He recovered pretty admirably and adjusted his robe before making a small bow.

"You are the girl from the Mystic Moon, yes?" he asked a little bit breathlessly, like he was meeting someone famous.

"Yep."

"How incredible. The honor, madam, is mine," he said, still flustered.

"I'm Sarah." I held out my hand. He held out his own, just brushing the tips of my fingers before hastily pulling it back in his robe.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Oh, you needn't worry about such a trivial thing as that," he reassured me, "But my name is Yali. The honor is mine." He bobbed down again.

"Where can I find something to eat?" I asked. Yali looked down both hallways.

"I would be honored to take you," he said and quickly bustled down the hall. We walked in silence, with Yali occasionally looking back at me with wonder. It was plain that he wanted to ask questions but was too polite to do so.

"What's this building?" I asked as we wound through the hallways.

"This is our research complex. It has more offices now than labs, and dormitories in the basement for visitors. The real work happens in there," he said, gesturing to a new structure as we stepped into the searing daylight outside.

"Like animal experiments?"

"Correct. And that used to be the Emperor's menagerie, but we are now using it as an area to test our newest innovations for the front line."

The area he was referring to was at the end of a large, patchy lawn, circled by a tall iron fence at least ten feet in height. There were a number of small cranes just visible over the top of the fence, and the area around the outside was full of ripped up soil. I could hear a rhythmic pounding coming from that direction, a clang of metal on something dull.

"Is there a hospital?"

"Of course, you would be interested in that! I had forgotten that you are a physician." Yali exclaimed with delight, "The hospital is unfortunately some ways from here. They wanted it to be closer to where the soldiers are quartered. Sadly, I fear that many in my field look down on the healing arts. Ah, here is the cafeteria." He opened the door to a long, low building and beckoned me inside. It was a typical mess hall and we grabbed a tray and got in line. The offerings were scant, pickled fish, mutton, bread. Yali took a joint of mutton and some bread and I followed suit.

"Is all food in Zaibach like this?" I asked petulantly. I had hoped that the capital might have some more diverse offerings than were offered on the Vione. I was so tired of mutton and goat.

"Off campus it's better," Yali laughed.

"You'll have to take me offsite then. The food on the Vione was pretty much the same as this, and very uninspired."

"So unexpected," Yali said, smiling and shaking his head. He said this more in response to an inner dialogue than our conversation.

"Sorry? What's unexpected?"

"You. If it hadn't been for your healing skills, we would have brought you back to the capital much sooner than this."

"Do you know why they picked me?" I asked. Yali was a young scientist who spent his time pursuing with enthusiasm the questions of his day. He was without guile and artifice, and I knew that he might actually be able to give me the answers that I sought. As his face lit up with enthusiasm, I knew that my hunch was correct.

"There was a massive flux in all of our metrics of fate a few weeks ago. We thought perhaps that this meant that the time had come to implement the plans to share our ideas with the rest of Gaea. The calculations were unbalanced after that flux, however, none of our mathematics made sense. Everyone with any sort of skill was pulled onto the project to try to bring Gaea back into equilibrium. My specialty area is space time and astronomic calculus. I can't speak specifically to the human component of the project; I wasn't involved in that aspect. My understanding, in simple terms, was that you were the solution to an equation with many variables. My own involvement was in how to get you from there to here." He grabbed a napkin and a pencil from the inside of his robe. He started to write down a complicated series of symbols. Some I recognized as the characters for numbers but I had no idea about the rest. He nominally was explaining them to me, but I didn't understand what he was saying. I briefly reached out to his mind, but though the numbers made sense to him, it was more bewildering to witness their actual application than the simplified version he was currently explaining.

"-so as you can see, what they were asking me to do was just ridiculous. When you are dealing with numbers in this scale, having you arrive here, on campus, is absurd. Besides the fact that we had no idea what we were pulling from Gaea, at that point, we didn't know that the force was a girl. I told them this but they didn't listen or care. In any case, I was pleased that you arrived as close to the capital as you did, but of course, _close_ is a matter of perspective."

"Why didn't they have me come here after the Dragon Slayers found me?"

"Because the flux was centered around the Fanelian king. Given that Strategos Folken and Van Fanel are brothers, it was felt that keeping you near Folken would be of benefit. Some people think that the fact that you arrived so near the Vione was not coincidence, something about that Fanelian blood I guess. Of course, there are those who think that Folken did something to influence your arrival, but that's clearly impossible." He held up his napkin with equations as though it should be completely evident.

"We are trying to do it again you know," Yali said quietly, looking at me to gauge my response. My heart stopped for a second as a thousand thoughts crowded into my mind. They had decided that I was worthless, they were calling another girl. But how nice it would be to talk to someone from home!

"Another girl?"

" _The_ girl," Yali said smugly.

"Who?"

"The other girl, the other one from the Mystic Moon. And this time I should be able to get her on campus."

"When are they doing this Yali?"

"The equations are done; they are just finishing the apparatus. If I had more knowledge of engineering I could give a more reliable estimate."

I hung around with Yali for the rest of the day. The next morning, I met him at the mess, and then spent the day watching him do research, which was excruciating. I mostly handed him pencils and fetched him books. I spent much of the morning staring out the window. The sky was a hard, deep blue here and the sun beat down on the ground relentlessly. My window afforded a view of the mountains, rounded, brown and shimmering in the heat.

Once we were outside, on our way to the mess for dinner, I could feel the sun searing on my skin. It radiated through the fabric of my Zaibach dress, this one hunter green with rust embroidery on the sleeves. Yali was yammering on about his equations from the morning, dreaming of the glory it would bring him at the Academy meeting. I was almost grateful when I heard a familiar voice shout my name from across the green, which was actually quite brown in the scorching summer sun.

Mesmen hurried across the lawns towards me, his bald head and upturned nose a welcome sight.

"I've been looking everywhere for you once I had heard you were in the capital!" he shouted, pulling up next to us.

"Who on earth is that?" he asked, peering at Yali for just a second before returning his gaze to me, "I was thinking that, since you are here, we might visit the hospital together." He started to walk in a different direction from the mess hall, and I followed him. I glanced back at Yali to say goodbye and to apologize, but he had already turned back towards the mess hall.

Mesmen took me outside the campus, hailed a cab, and we were on our way to the hospital. It was interesting to see the capital now that it wasn't shrouded in darkness. The city was dominated by a huge palace in the center, an ugly structure with great sloping sides. It was by far the largest structure, dwarfed only by the distant mountains. The buildings were new and largely without character. There were more construction cranes than trees, and the grass that clung to the ground between buildings was dry and brown. I was surprised by the number of vagrants and beggars. I also saw plenty of women dressed like me, baskets over their arms, doubtless running errands or going to market. Most of the traffic on the street were hansom coaches like ours, pulled by horse-like creatures with three toes and stubby manes. Here and there were steam-powered wheeled vehicles that made an absurd amount of noise as they clattered down the narrow streets.

The hospital was located by the military campus, on the banks of the wide, sluggish red river than ran through the middle of the city. Soldiers sat on the terrace in front of the brick hospital, obviously patients given how many were amputees. Mesmen was excited and led me inside, boasting of this or that feature of the building. Inside, each floor was separated into 2 wings with open wards. The first floor was all orthopedic patients, for the most part sitting up in bed and playing cards with one another or flirting with nurses. The next floor was more obviously a medicine floor. These patients were more quiet, pale or jaundiced, laying in bed in various stages of pain and dying. I scanned each room for a pale face with silver hair, but I did not find Dilandau.

Mesmen dictated my schedule for the rest of the week. Every morning we would round on the patients in the hospital, in the afternoon he had me meet with his teenage daughter on the university campus who had the misfortune of teaching me how to read Zaibachi.

Mesmen's daughter was very bright, already a top student in the academy as distinguished by the pins she wore on her black robes. She was specializing in the linguistics of my world and was a good teacher. Each day, she would bring a newspaper and have me translate it, with her help. In turn, I helped her translate the two books written in English that she was analyzing for her thesis, there was a third book, but I couldn't decipher the writing within. The books were a green pocket New Testament of the hotel room Gideon variety and a dusty and yellowed Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. It seemed that this world collected the detritus from my world, and I had the sudden image of myself as cosmic flotsum, washed up in Gaea.

This idea haunted me and I was feeling particularly homesick, both for North Dakota and for the Vione the next afternoon. Thus far, most of the articles I had been translating had been short articles about social happenings and innovations in that particular brand of Zaibachi pseudoscience, Destiny Prognostication.

"This is a very exciting article, about a great victory," she said, sliding across a newssheet printed that morning. I picked it up, the wall of incomprehensible characters exhausting me.

"Start here. What's the first word?" The first few characters were familiar from yesterday and I stumbled along until I hit a word I didn't recognize.

"Sound it out," Mesmen's daughter instructed gently.

"F-O-L-K-" My eyes widened. I knew this word and suddenly I was wide awake.

The article detailed how the Vione, under the direction of Strategos Folken, had hounded the Escaflowne to a remote valley. There was no where they could run to from there. The game was up and they were planning on engaging the Crusade this morning. The article described two "fate soldiers" under Folken's direct command-who could they be?

"Are you ok?" asked Mesmen's daughter.

"Yeah. Fine." I shook my head to clear it. The battle field seemed so far away from these manicured lawns on the brink of autumn, but I felt more alien here than I ever did on the Vione.

"Well, I have to go to class. You can translate the rest of the paper tonight. I'll bring more battle articles, you seemed to like those more," she said as she turned to go.

The following day, instead of Mesmen's daughter, two young sorcerers in training were waiting for me.

"You need to come with us," they ordered, and, bile raising in my throat, I followed them. They led me past what had been the Emperor's menagerie; we picked our way over discarded pipe sections and shell casings to a narrow white tower on the other side. The building was new, the corners of the stone crisp and white. We descended down so many flights of stairs that I lost count until we finally stopped in front of a large metal door. The young men knocked impatiently, a guard peeped through the keyhole and permitted us to enter. The room was packed with sorcerers in long black robes. There were copper pipes along a whole wall with nervous, twitching needles on gauges. The air smelled singed, thrumming with currents of energy. As though I was someone important, the sorcerers parted before me, ushering me to the far end of the room. A huge window looked down onto a larger room below, which contained three cages suspended in the air.

Van I recognized from his brief imprisonment on the Vione. He was crouched in the corner of his cage, his lean brown arms gripping his knees. In the cage next to him was a man with long blonde hair in uniform, sitting with his back to the bars of his cage and his feet stretched out in front of him. Hitomi was in the third. She was much younger than me, with short sandy blonde hair and large green eyes. She knelt in her cage and gestured wildly, imploringly, though I couldn't hear what she said. The needles on the gauges twitched in rhythm with her. It was strange, after all this time, to see her. The entire course of my life had been swung into motion because of this small teenager. How on earth could she be so important? I tried to hear her thoughts but could pick up nothing. Absolutely nothing. Concerned that perhaps I had lost my gift, I cast about the room. The tall sorcerer next to me was wondering what I was doing. He thought that I was a mistake, a miscalculation, though he allowed himself to consider that there was perhaps something that had called me specifically. But this had to be unlikely, because I was such a spectacular failure. This was enough to reinforce that I hadn't lost my gift completely then. But why couldn't I hear Hitomi, or for that matter, Van or the other prisoner? As I stared through the glass, I realized that it was crisscrossed through with wire. I followed the wires with my eyes and saw that they ran the entire length and width of the room where the cages were suspended. A Faraday box. That's why I couldn't hear them.

"You are aware that you are part of a pair?" he asked, staring at me over the top of his round reading glasses. I could tell from the way the other sorcerers held back that he was someone of particular importance.

"I've never met her before," I said.

"That doesn't matter. This is much bigger than simply knowing a person. When the girl arrived on Gaea, we were thrown into disequilibrium. We summoned you to provide an equal and opposite vector to her."

"Oh." I could tell that he was underwhelmed that I was not as remarkable in my powers as Hitomi. Little he knew. I quickly choked down the guilt that perhaps I could have used my gift to save the Dragon Slayers.

"We want to take you down there to talk to her," he said. I nodded.

 _It's you_.

The moment I entered the room, I felt her. Her power was present in the air, hanging thick as humidity. Hitomi bolted up onto her knees and immediately her green eyes locked with mine. Even though I was across the room, I felt like I had fallen into a cinote of warm, sage green water. I could feel her in my mind, an uncomfortable, burrowing presence. She took stock of the whole of me as though she were in my home, casually picking up bric a brac and leafing through memories like they were vacation photos. I was completely laid bare before her. But I was immersed in her as well. I stood in her bedroom with the posters on the wall, heard her little brother brushing his teeth; I saw the cartoon animal keychains on her back pack. I could smell the cloyingly sweet perfume that the girls in her school wore, and I felt the itch and tug of polyester school uniforms, bras that were too tight. I could see the boys she hoped would notice her as she walked to class, the cards she would use, hoping each day that they would tell her that she was special. I felt the drumming in her heart and dryness in her mouth when Amano spoke with her.

Her presence suddenly stilled and I was conscious of the fact that she was crying. She had discovered the memory of my suicide. No one knew about that moment but me and as long as I didn't think about, I could pretend that it didn't happen. Now there was a witness, which made it real. I wanted her out; I put my hands over my ears, shut my eyes and clenched my jaw. I didn't want her empathy, my decision to die had been mine and mine alone. It wasn't her right to look at my darkest memories and pretend that she understood me, it wasn't her right to pity me. I spun around and fled.

"Wait, Sarah!" Hitomi shouted as I felt her lose her grip on my mind. I pushed through crowds of sorcerers and felt once again invisible when I was on the other side of the Faraday cage. It wasn't far enough, I felt horror and shame and fear that I had once stood on the wrong side of a bridge and let go. I now felt so vitally alive that the thought that I jumped into that yawning black abyss was terrifying. What if I hadn't been called to Gaea? I would be dead at the bottom of Lake Michigan. I would be as dead as the Dragon Slayers. And who was she to feel sorry for me? I didn't deserve her pity, nor did I need it. I thought, as I pounded up the stairs of the tower, that I could outrun the choking horror that I had been so close to dying, and the discomfort that my whole life had stood naked before Hitomi and she had dared to feel sorry for me. I pushed through the doors of the tower and into the cool night. A storm had come up, and thunder roiled in the distance as I stumbled over the rubbish in the yard before the tower. I ran back up the green, my legs pumping furiously. I became conscious of my form and relaxed into my body, allowing my wrists to slacken and consciously tilting my pelvis down. My thighs slowed just slightly but felt strong and my calves burned as I took the hill and I gloried in the ache. She could see my memories but she would never understand the full measure of me. I had passed through darkness and water and blood to get here. I breathed the dry gritty air through my nose and splashed through puddles of rust colored water.

Just as I crested the hill, everything went white, but there was no crack of thunder. I stumbled forward, shutting my eyes against the glare, and fell onto my outstretched hands. The pain of the light against my eyelids hurt worse than the rocks tearing into the heels of my hands and I brought my knuckles into them even as I tasted the iron of my blood on my lips. The light was so intense that I shook as though I had a fever, my eyes watering profusely.

The brightness died suddenly, and hesitantly I pried my hands from my face. I was blind.

Gradually I became aware of the shapes around me, lit only by distant stars. The entire city had gone dark; there wasn't a single streetlight lit on the whole university campus. I could hear the sounds of distant bells and the grumbling and shouting as people spilled out from nearby buildings. Already crouched on the ground, I inched closer to a shrub and pushed into the leaves to wait out the darkness. There had been a massive energy surge and power outage. It could've been lighting, some experiment gone wrong or even an attack, but I knew in my bones that Hitomi was now far away from here.


	20. Chapter 20

20

It took half a day to get the power back on, and everyone on campus looked unnerved. Martein had dark circles under his eyes and his sorcerer's robe was wrinkled and dirty. He stood the moment I was shown into his office, the veins exaggerated on his neck as he clenched his jaw with fury.

"How did you do it?" he spat. My heart pounded in my chest and I looked desperately around. Was I being accused of the power outage?

"I don't know what you are talking about. What did I do?" I asked, voice shaking. I wanted to hide.

"The girl, Hitomi. She is gone, as is the Escaflowne," he said, glaring at me.

"Oh," I said dumbly. I knew she was gone, had felt it immediately after the bright flashing light, but I couldn't let on that I knew and unfortunately, I am abysmal liar. I could feel myself blushing, the redness creeping up my neck.

"What are you hiding from us?" Martien asked, suddenly calm, coming around the side of his desk and standing directly in front of me.

"I'm not hiding anything!" I said weakly.

"Everyone thought that you would have the gift. All of our parameters were meant to select someone who could influence destiny. And yet every report from Strategos Folken said nothing, nothing nothing. Have you been lying to us?" They knew. It was over. But I wouldn't damn myself. "Something happened with that girl in there. I saw you run. What happened? What did the girl do to you?" I thought he was going to strike me.

"That's enough Martein."

I've never been so grateful to see anyone in my entire life. Folken looked more handsome than he ever had before, all broad shoulders and high cheek bones, his hair the color of sea ice. His violet tattoos were so welcome and familiar on his face. He gave me a tiny smile as he swooped into the room.

"She isn't hiding anything. Her service to Zaibach has been nothing if not exemplary."

"And her meeting with the girl was nothing if not suspicious!" Martein shot back.

"You are upset, as we all are, at the loss of the Escaflowne and the girl from the Mystic Moon from our very grasp. However, now more than ever we need to work together. False accusations only sow malcontent, I fear." Folken rested his left hand on my shoulder, the warm pads of his fingers pressing up against the bottom of my clavicle, which gave the gesture a sort of intimacy that Martein did not miss as he looked from me to Folken.

"Very well. Now get out."

Folken led us out of the building, into the bright autumn sunlight. He kept his hand firm on my shoulder as though he was worried that if he let go, I would run. He didn't speak to me but nodded in greeting at several sorcerers as we cut across the green. I said nothing. I wanted to run away, and I felt deeply worried that I was beholden to him for saving me from Martein. Part of me, though, missed him with an intensity that surprised me. I craved that intimacy; I knew no one in Zaibach's capital, other than Dilandau, who for all I knew could be dead. Feeling the slight heat from his hand on my skin made me feel like I existed in a way that I hadn't felt since the Dragon Slayers had died and Dilandau had vanished. I wanted to throw my arms around him, to anchor myself to someone that I knew, and talk with him for hours. Together we would figure out how to get Dilandau back, and we would go back on the Vione, and this mistake of mine would be forgiven and forgotten.

Folken led me to an old laboratory towards the back of the campus.

"The novices don't use this building much anymore," he said, more to himself than to me. We walked up a flight of stairs and through an old laboratory, the black benches dusty. Towards the back there was a narrow room with a cot, a desk chair, and a small window, the view outside obscured by bare vines.

"I used to sleep here sometimes when I was running a long experiment," he said, bracing his arms against the window, "That was a long time ago."

I said nothing, wanting him to declare his intentions. His mind was in utter disarray and I found it too distracting to try to piece out his thoughts when I wasn't sure of my own mind. If he wanted me to go with him, would I say yes?

"Sarah- "he started, looking out the window. He said my name painfully, as though the sibilant filled his mouth with glass, the middle consonant heavy on his tongue. Suddenly a shade came over his face and his mouth twisted into a sneer _._

"And how is _Dilandau_?"

"What exactly are you implying?" I asked, chest and cheeks flushing.

"I don't know, Sarah, you tell me. This is my invitation to exonerate yourself. I want desperately to think that you aren't a whore."

"Excuse me? You don't get to talk to me like that!"

"Forgive me. I forget that you do not charge."

"I haven't been with him! I can't believe I am having this conversation with you!" I felt wild and defensive, though I did nothing wrong.

"Of course. I should have known that he wouldn't touch you." Folken said this as though I were garbage in the street.

"He was sick and I tried to help him. He is my patient."

"You talk about him like he's a man. Why can't you see what he is?"

"I don't know what happened to him. I do know that he is a deeply broken person- "

"That's a generous assessment," Folken laughed derisively, "We never intended for Dilandau to be human."

I took a step back from him. _We never intended for him to be human_. What had they done to him? What kind of sick experiment had warped Dilandau's brain? And now he was back in their clutches and possibly even dead.

"How can you live with yourself?"

"I am working to create an ideal future. The fate of one small child is inconsequential compared to a world without war."

"Well, that's pretty utilitarian of you. You just keep telling yourself that," I sneered.

"Yes, the level of self deception is not dissimilar to telling yourself that you are chasing after a man that will never love you because he's your patient," Folken spat. He appeared to measure his words for a moment, before saying softly, in almost a whisper, "I had other women after you."

Folken wanted to hurt me, so that our wounds would match, and we could heal together. He dared to hope that in my silence I was contemplating the things that he said. He needed me. It wasn't love motivating him, nothing close. He felt that since his mother had been fated for his father, and Hitomi for Van, that the stars had decreed that I was destined for him. He felt disappointed that I wasn't beautiful or powerful, but had felt encouraged by our brief congress on the floor of his office. He wanted me because I came from Earth and because the universe owed him a celestial bride, not because there was a single thing about me, Sarah, that he found attractive or even liked. He thought I was shrewish and cold; in his assessment I wasn't pretty, but I could be a lot uglier. I felt embarrassed, that perhaps he was right, and I was just a whore, given how quickly I would have taken him back. But my shame fueled my fury. He was right, the only way this would end was with us both bleeding, but reconciliation was not my goal. I took a moment to pick my words carefully; I plumbed his mind for his deepest fears and named them aloud.

"You are a failure and a traitor."

Slowly, I turned and walked out the room. I managed to get all the way to other side of the lab door before my arms started to shake. Folken made no motion to follow me.


	21. Chapter 21

Chapter 21

I regretted incinerating my relationship once I had time to think about it, and I paced my small dormitory that whole night. I felt hollow and ugly when dawn finally came, a familiar, post-call feeling. In marked contrast to my grim mood, it was one of those fall days where the color is so precise that it seems like the refraction of the world has been turned up. I sat for a while on the terrace outside the university library, drinking tea and feeling totally stuck. From a purely pragmatic perspective, there was now no one to protect me from Martein if he started asking me questions again. Other than Mesmen, there was no one that I could turn to, and with each passing day I grew more convinced that I would never see Dilandau again.

As I stared across the common area feeling hopeless, I saw a huge figure come out of a building across the green and begin walking towards the new construction by the menagerie. There was no mistaking the dog man from the day that I lost Dilandau. His fur was the color of sand and honey, his long muzzle probably three inches across, long whiskers in three rows on either side. His garb was the pale blue of an orderly, and he was walking arm and arm with a woman who was obviously sick. She was tall and walked with a gait that made me immediately think that she had an issue with her nervous system. She jerkily brought her knees up too high, beating the whole of her long narrow foot on the ground with each step instead of rolling from heel to toe. She tottered stiffly from side to side, uncertain of her balance. Her hair was a short, ashy blonde, thin tendrils curling around her ears.

I stood up so quickly that I bumped the table, causing my mug of tea to fall to the tiled patio with a startling crash. Some of the sorcerers sitting around me turned to stare as I rushed across the green. The dog-man's attention was so fixed on the girl that I slowed some distance away, aware that interrupting them would be most unwelcome. He walked with exaggerated patience, encouraging her, holding her hand carefully in his own massive paws. He saw only her, and stared at her with round, adoring eyes the color of chocolate. They moved between two buildings and entered a small courtyard garden where the beast man set her carefully down on a stone bench, where she pointed and cooed wordlessly. Their contentment at enjoying this beautiful fall day together was so complete that I didn't have it in me to ruin it by badgering him about Dilandau, charging into their peaceful retreat unwanted.

I watched the building where I had seen the dog man and the girl obsessively over the next week. I had almost given up hope and was cursing myself for not interrupting him, when I saw the dog-man again. This time, I would find out what happened to Dilandau; I sprinted across the green towards him. "Hey!" I gasped, running to catch up with him. I grabbed his arm and he finally turned to look down at me. His face was huge in size and completely impassive. He said nothing, only looked down at me, like I should be so impertinent to touch him. After seeing how tender he had been with the girl last week, I was surprised that he was so cold.

"Dilandau. You know where he is," I said, still catching my breath.

"Yes."

"I've been looking for him. I'm Sarah, I was on the Vione with him."

"So, it was your decision to bring him back here," he growled, sounding sad and disappointed.

"Well, um, yes. He was having a psychotic episode. I didn't know how to fix him." He said nothing and continued walking. The complete lack of facial clues made our short conversation even more disorienting. Did he want me to follow him? He had a long, stiff stride and keeping up with his was difficult. The dog man never paused to see if I was following. He seemed to steel himself before we entered the building; I saw his haunches quiver and his tail twitch towards his legs. I opened my mouth to say something, but he glared at me, so I shut up again.

We wound our way downstairs, going at least 2 floors below ground. It was cold and dark, the hallways without ornament. There were hospital beds, boxes of old lights, and IV poles pushed against the walls of the corridors. The dog man pushed through a pair of double doors, into a larger hallway with three doors on each side. Four sorcerers were clustered around a window built into the wall. The window was reinforced with chicken wire. My guide's fur on the back of his neck rose and he pulled his ears back, lifting his lips into a slight snarl, his eyes so wide that the white showed all the way around the deep brown irises. A few of the sorcerers backed away to give us space in front of the window.

"Are you sure that you can handle it this time Jajuka? You can wait outside," one of the sorcerers said to us.

"I will be fine," Jajuka said.

Dilandau was strapped down to a table, with leather bands buckled around his bare chest, his abdomen, and binding each arm and leg to the metal table. He had an IV in his left antecubital fossa and some sort of tan cap fitted over his head. Wires attached the cap to a machine on the wall. There was one sorcerer in the room with him, adjusting the levers and knobs on the machine. Dilandau's face was gaunt and slicked with sweat. His eyes were tightly shut, his face wrinkled in a grimace. He thrashed against the straps once, but they didn't move.

"They say that this should be his last treatment," the beast man said in a low, gruff voice.

"What are they doing to him?" I asked, my voice wavering a little bit.

"You shall see."

"Are you ready?" one of the sorcerers on my side of the glass asked into a telephone attached to a wall. The young sorcerer in the room made two more adjustments and left the room.

"I tried a slightly different setting. If I don't blow his memory it should do the trick." Jajuka growled at the young sorcerer's words, who scowled back at him.

"Charging." Now that Dilandau was alone in the room, he began to squirm on the table, tightening all of his muscles and showing his teeth.

"Charged."

"Deliver the charge."

"Charge delivering."

Dilandau immediately began to have a seizure. His eyes flew open, unseeing, and his head rotated to the right. His muscles then began to move in fine, tight jerks. One of the sorcerers placed her hand on the door, in her other a loaded syringe. The sorcerer behind her had an intubation blade and bag. After about thirty seconds, Dilandau's movements stilled and he began to breath deeply. The sorcerer relaxed her grip on the door and slowly pulled it open. Instead of injecting him, they loosened the leather straps. Jajuka went in and I followed. Jajuka grabbed a towel from a tray beside the bed and wiped Dilandau's face.

"Jajuka," Dilandau whispered thickly. He spat blood on the floor of the exam room.

"I am here."

"Good. What happened to me?"

"They gave you another treatment, sir."

"MMhmm." Dilandau surveyed the room like a drunk, slowly and without comprehension. Confusion is common after seizures. He would clear soon.

Jajuka tried to help Dilandau put on a soft grey shirt but Dilandau slapped his paw away. Dilandau jumped off the table and swayed for just a moment, regaining his equilibrium without Jajuka's outstretched paw. He fumbled through the door, throwing it open with enough force to send it banging against the other wall. The sorcerers flinched. He stumbled down the hall with Jajuka just behind and me trailing even further back. He stopped with his hands braced on a window frame, his head lolling. He threw up, pink spit stringing like a spider web from his mouth. He wiped his mouth on the back of his shirt sleeve and stood up. He looked at Jajuka and when his eyes took me in they scanned the full length of my body dumbly, without a trace of recognition.

"You remember this woman from before," Jajuka prompted quietly.

"Yeah." Dilandau nodded, though he seemed unsure. Jajuka narrowed his gaze at me to put as fine a point as he could on the fact that Dilandau did not know me anymore. It shouldn't have been a big deal, but even though I kept reminding myself that he was post-ictal, it bothered me tremendously that Dilandau didn't seem to remember me. He stumbled between Jajuka and myself, occasionally stopping at windows or looking down hallways. The huge relief that I had felt on seeing him alive was diminishing, Dilandau _was_ alive, but at what cost? There was no evidence of his grace and frenetic intellect; he seemed lobotomized and I quickly became nauseated when I realized that these pseudo-medical, bloodless researchers may have done just that. I had been completely erased from his mind. I had arrived too late; Dilandau was gone. I had just made up my mind to mourn him, to add him to my mental roster of the dead when he leaned close to my ear and whispered, "Witch."


	22. Chapter 22

22

Between rounding at the hospital and trying to help with Dilandau, I didn't have much time over the next few days to think about what had happened with Folken, and I didn't want to. But if I was being honest with myself, I think I haunted Dilandau's appointments and practices because he was the last familiar thing that remained, and even then, it was hard to say that this confused and sick boy was the fearsome captain that I had first known. I was treated like a nuisance by all of the sorcerers overseeing his treatment, and Jajuka barely concealed his dislike for me and for Dilandau.

It was therefore a surprise when the sorcerers actually seemed glad to see me when Dilandau showed up to one of his blood draws, Jajuka and I in tow. My old friend Yali burst through the doors, instantly turning green at the volume of blood they were drawing from Dilandau.

"I've been looking for you!" He almost grabbed my arm before remembering to be afraid of me.

"Why?"

"We need you for an experiment. Fortune truly must be smiling on us today!" he exclaimed. Already, my stomach was in knots, given the last time the sorcerers had requested my presence.

He led me across campus to the newest building of the complex. We entered a huge open room, easily the size of a gymnasium, crammed with sorcerers and equipment. Condensation dripped from copper pipes in rivulets down the walls and beakers sparkled from atop the rows of benches, a delicate counter-point to the heavy industrial equipment on the floor. Yali pushed with surprising aggression through the junior sorcerers, all humming with importance.

Folken was standing next to four sorcerers on a platform overlooking the room. He loomed with the menace of an eagle, shaking his head as the sorcerer with the half moon spectacles expounded, hitting his fist in his palm for emphasis. Huge and handsome, he dominated all of my senses. Folken raised his hand to interject, just as Yali and I sidled up to the conversation.

"It has come to my attention recently that love and lust are vectors that exert a gravity towards, or away from a person," Folken said to the assembled senior sorcerers, ignoring me with such obvious intention that I knew he was still angry, "As young girls so rarely know their own hearts, I think it would be possible to exert a similar pressure on the girl, and direct her affections elsewhere." He glanced at me then, eyes narrowed. I clenched my teeth so hard I worried about cracking one of my molars in fury and embarrassment.

"It lacks a certain elegance but, as you have already convinced the Emperor, there is little I will do to stand in your way, _Strategos."_ The hawkish sorcerer's tone was so condescending I found myself snickering.

"He has. We will commence then."

"Wait," the sorcerer commanded, catching sight of me for the first time, "Come here girl." He beckoned me close with an impatient gesture.

"What do you think of using her as a gravity?" he asked, looking me over as though weighing my variables, "We parallel the girls to strengthen the vector towards her."

"I disagree. I think, given my own blood, that to pair Sarah and myself in this experiment would only echo and strengthen the link between the girl and the Dragon," Folken said.

"Fine then, get Adelphos' monster. It has some sort of connection to Leon Schezar," the hawkish sorcerer said.

"I doubt he has the wherewithal given his current mental state to obey instructions. Besides, this will require exquisite control of variables, and even when Dilandau is himself, he is compliant perhaps fifteen percent of the time. I submit myself for this experiment, since it has never before been performed and may have unforeseen side effects. One of my female servants has also volunteered for the task," Folken declared, made furious by the mention of the pairing of Dilandau and myself.

"Suit yourself. You've always had your experiments your way. Hopefully _this_ one doesn't end in a disciplinary hearing," he said with a wry smile, the other sorcerers chuckling as they left. Folken's face was white with fury, looking anywhere but at me. I was grateful at least that I looked nice; the tight red Zaibach dress was probably the most flattering thing I owned.

"What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?" I finally asked.

"Does it matter, given how much of a failure you perceive me to be?" Folken said shortly. He turned away from me and leaned his arms against the railing.

"You aren't a failure Lord Folken," two voices purred in perfect synchrony. Two cat women brushed past me with a flick of their long tails. They towered over me by almost a foot, with sinuous curves, spotted like leopards. They rubbed against Folken obsequiously, purring.

"Who would ever think such a thing?" the one patterned like a snow leopard said, rubbing her head on his shoulder.

"Certainly no one that knows you, my Lord," this from the golden one. She twisted around under his arm, turning to look at me and hiss as she did so.

I quickly turned around, disgusted at the display, and banged down the staircase. Doubtless those were the 'other women after me'.

The junior sorcerers hustled around the large room in a flurry of activity and I meandered among them to avoid talking to Folken. There were two glass vials, each containing a single hair, that were placed near electrodes. Nearby, a young sorcerer ground a pile of brown, wilting roses in a mortar and pestle, adding a sickly sweet, musty smell to the spicy odor of bay leaves that floated into the air. Small purple bugs were being mashed and suspended in a beaker with wine, while another sorcerer injected something into a tube embedded in the wall.

Once the solutions were suspended and the wires attached, the sorcerers became very still. Folken stood on a suspension bridge in the middle of the room. Underneath was a huge reactor that lit him from below, his skin washed to a sickly pale green, his eyes dark holes. There was a large apparatus consisting of metal rods connected to a giant gold point, suspended above him with the menace of a guillotine. There was a fine sheen of sweat on his brow, he kept wiping it with the corner of his cloak. On the other side the golden twin leaned against the railing, the constant undulation of her tail betraying her anxiety. I stood on a podium near the silver twin, who toyed absently with a gold coin.

"Critical particle density!"

Folken and the golden twin met in the middle of the bridge. The light below them grew stronger and hot. It emitted a sawing whine, which reverberated in my skull and made me feel nauseated.

I saw Hitomi ascending the stone steps of a bridge that would lead her into the city proper. She heard nothing about the hush of the rain, which fell in fine drops, weaving the world together in threads of grey and silver. Her hand still smarted from where she had slapped Van's cheek and she flexed it into a fist, to feel the pain more acutely. Her feet squelched in her tennis shoes; she worried for a moment that they would be ruined, but then welcomed it, the thought that something so precious was now destroyed felt right. She was cold and she thought of running, both to get warm and for the satisfaction of grinding out her anger on the pavement, but she also felt so profoundly tired that she didn't know if she could even keep walking, and being angry felt futile somehow. It wasn't that she even liked Van; he was too skinny, too serious. He shouldn't have this ability to make her feel so stupid and out of control. What did she care if he just wanted to use her for her power? That was the only thing she was good for anyway. Why had she reacted like that?

She braced her arms on the stone and leaned over in order to better see the flaws in her face, but her image was distorted by the rain as it met the surface of the water. She thought about drowning in the river, and she briefly fantasized about how poorly Van would feel, knowing it was his fault.

"Hitomi." Immediately, she had a momentary, irrational fear that Allen had known her thoughts. It felt like a betrayal to him, to have Van affect her so. Despite the cold, her face suddenly felt too hot and her stomach gave a nervous little flip. She wasn't able to speak, but he gave her space to compose herself. He raised his brows and his eyes twinkled, as though running into her on this bridge made braving the rain worthwhile. He reached into the pocket of his sodden blue uniform and pulled out a small handkerchief with a flourish.

"You look a little damp," he said in understatement as the corners of his lips lifted, betraying the joke. Hitomi laughed. Allen always made her feel better.

Folken's arms encircled Eriya. She wanted this, liked the feeling of his arms around her, but not this way. Her muscles were shaking and sore as though she had a fever, the heat from the reactor below was relentless and she wanted to turn from him and be sick over the side of the railing.

"You're shivering," Allen said. His voice was slightly husky and his pupils were dilated, black pools framed with azure. He rubbed his hands on her arms to warm her, moving closer to her with this gesture.

"We will need to get you inside soon," he said into her ear, now drawing his arms around her. Hitomi could feel the two kicks of his heartbeat against her cheek. But she didn't deserve this. Allen was so handsome and so perfect that the only woman worthy of him was Millerna. Millerna was beautiful and smart and royal and so nice to her that she couldn't hate her, in fact, she was betraying her friendship. She didn't deserve anyone, not even skinny Van wanted her and with good reason. She was hideous and stupid, who would ever want her? Hitomi pulled away from Allen.

"Eriya, you must focus," Folken scolded, "You must think only of me." Folken felt ill himself; he could feel the radiation burning his cheeks. The pain in his right shoulder was so acute his eyes watered. It felt like the screws that fastened the prosthesis to his body were tightening in tiny half turns and he felt every twist. Eriya looked flushed.

"I'll try," she said, voice wavering.

"Whenever I'm with you, I feel at peace," he said, tilting her chin up as he shut his eyes and leaned forward. She shut her eyes and leaned into him, lips pressing against his.

I felt a flash of furious jealousy and I was immediately back in my own body, feeling nothing. That feeling hadn't come from me, there was nothing passionate or appealing about how Folken and Eriya embraced; it was like making two dolls kiss. They were bathed in greenish yellow light, so bright that it was hard to look at them. That grating noise from the reactor was reaching a crescendo, it felt like my teeth were vibrating in time with the oscillations of the machine and were about to shake loose from my skull. The sound suddenly stopped and the light faded to a dull glow. Folken and Eriya stumbled away from one another. Eriya fell to her knees and was violently sick. Folken grasped his right shoulder where it met the prosthesis and rocked back and forth, eyes tightly shut in pain.

A few of the sorcerers began to applaud, shaking hands in self congratulation but it was subdued. I walked over to the bridge, the heat from the metal radiating through my shoes even though the light had died from the machine. Nariya went to Eriya and the golden twin clung to her sister, moaning. I stood near Folken.

"Are you ok?" I asked.

"This was a mistake," he moaned, his eyes shut.


	23. Chapter 23

23

The fall weather continued, warm and dry and bright. It was pleasant to sit next the open window in my room; here I could ignore the constant tattoo of Zaibach marching to war. I heard a sharp knock on my door. Folken nodded when I opened the door, a brisk motion, and made to walk into my room.

"What do you want?" I asked, crossing my arms, blocking the narrow doorway with my body. Surprised that I would not immediately grant him entry, he finally met my gaze. The tired lines around his eyes and around his chapped lips tightened as he winced in embarrassment, recalling our argument.

"I need to speak with you. Please." His eyes were wide and earnest, his voice rough. Without his normal attitude of superiority and disdain, humiliation collapsed the bones of his broad frame.

I moved aside to let him in and he stepped passed me, turning sidewise to fit the bulk of his shoulders through the door and ducking under the low lintel. The room seemed too small to fit the two of us; I tried to stand as far away from him as possible to fight the force that drew me to him. The attraction and respect between us had been so fragile, ruined by our greedy exploitation of one another. The both of us were liars, our conversations a constant contest of manipulation; anything born of that union would surely be toxic. I braced myself so that I would find his charm obsequious.

"I was angry the other day and said things that were hurtful. I'm ashamed for that; my temper bested me," he began. He was uncomfortable and directed his comments to the open window.

"Ok," I said coldly, giving him nothing. What had hurt most about our fight wasn't what he had said to me, but what I had read in his thoughts. Knowing that he thought me ugly and frigid had wounded me deeply. It was irrational to hold his private thoughts against him, but I couldn't let that anger go.

"It's apparent now that though we were intimate, you never loved me the way that I loved you- "

"You are lying."

"I did love you, Sarah," he said with a brief flare of anger before mastering his temper once more, "But I hope that we might have a friendship. And I need your help." He met my gaze and I found fear there.

"What do you need?"

In response, he sat down on my bed. He looked at me the desperate way that sick patients look at doctors and I pulled up my chair next to him, feeling calm now that I knew that we would be having a medical interview and not a lover's quarrel.

"Something is wrong. I've never felt so weak."

"How long have you felt like this?"

"Ever since the fate alteration experiment. My arm pains me."

"Describe the pain for me."

"It always aches a little bit, but after the experiment, my arm feels loose, and it is as though all of the screws and wires are hot where it fastens into my flesh. The heat seemed to spread. Now I wake up every night drenched in sweat. And I'm so tired; I can barely think."

"Any cough, pain, or redness?"

"No."

I had him take off his cloak. Shadows outlined each rib and pooled in the hollow of his throat. His skin was clammy. His pulse was thankfully normal; there was no bruising on his skin. His abdomen was soft and his spleen was big. I examined his neck last, because I knew that I would find the answer there. I felt hard lymph nodes, fixed in position. Cancer. The malignant transformation occurred during the destiny experiment, the searing hot radiation breaking the DNA strand of a single blood cell, granting that cell immortality.

"I'm going to die, aren't I?" he said quietly in response to my expression as my fingers danced along his clavicle, nudging lymph nodes that would not move.

"I think so," I croaked, my mouth dry. I wanted so badly to lie; I couldn't. He nodded as though he had expected this and stood.

Wings shot from his back in an explosion of black feathers. They were enormous, the long primary feathers nearly as long as I was tall, and they touched the walls of my small room until he folded them against his back. Green, purple and gold glistened against the deep black, iridescent like the feathers of a starling. The autumn light from the window illuminated his scars and tattoos, shined off of the wires of his prosthesis and gave gloss to his magnificent wings. His expression was sad and humbled and in that soft afternoon light he looked like a martyred saint set in stained glass.

"They used to be white," he said.

"I don't understand," I stammered.

"You don't need to. You gave me my answer." I didn't know if he was referring to his heart or his cancer. He placed his warm hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes. He leaned in and pressed his lips to my cheek. As he turned, the wings disappeared and I was surrounded by a zephyr of black feathers.


	24. Chapter 24

On the cusp of feeling familiar, Gaea again was alien to me. That next week things seemed to happen at a great distance and move too slowly, sounds were muffled as though I were underwater. I kept wishing for a routine. If I were busy, I would stop seeing Chesta's pale body and torrents of black feathers in my dreams. The Dragon Slayers were dead, Folken was dying, and Dilandau was irretrievably broken.

He shook in fear as he sat on an examination table between Jajuka and I. His knuckles were white where they gripped the edge of the table. His left shoulder jerked upwards, he cracked his neck as he pitched his head to the side, his body in constant nervous motion.

The sorcerers finally came in, a mixed group of young trainees with their polished novice pins, and three older sorcerers with elaborately embroidered cowls on their robes. I recognized the woman and the frail-looking older man with white hair. They were accompanied by a third man that I hadn't seen yet, a portly man with grey hair and a grey mustache.

Dilandau looked at this man and launched himself off of the examination table; in the same motion, he grabbed a syringe off of the instrument tray, holding it like a shiv. He was fast but weak, and before he could get near the third sorcerer, Jajuka grabbed him around the waist and threw him to the floor. The glass of the syringe shattered in his hand. Dilandau was already down, but I saw Jajuka's paws bring him forward and slam his head against the tiles with a dull thud. Dilandau blinked rapidly for a second, bared his teeth, and lunged for the sorcerer again, but Jajuka already had an arm across his chest.

"You are not making this easy for yourself. Be biddable, just this once," Jajuka whispered harshly as Dilandau struggled against him. Jajuka pushed him back on the examination table and held down his shoulders. At a gesture from the senior female sorcerer, several of the novices came forward and placed their hands on his hip and thigh.  
"If you do not calm down and behave yourself, we will be forced to use more permanent restraints," the woman snapped.  
"Maybe if he wasn't surrounded he would be calmer," I said pointedly.  
"All observers will keep quiet or they will be asked to leave," the old man said, staring daggers at me before turning to the other novices, "I would point out what an exceptional job has been done in training the subject. See how well it fights! Its most base instinct is combat."  
"He's always been like that Spala. I think he's got demon blood," the portly sorcerer laughed nervously, shaken from Dilandau's attempt to kill him.  
"That history with the subject is precisely why we have asked you to attend our session today," Spala, the lean old man, said, "These displays are not unusual for it, I'm afraid. Adelphos would like to deploy it as quickly as possible. We've made significant progress so far, but I fear it is too erratic to trust on the battle field."  
We never intended for Dilandau to be human. Folken's words seemed to echo through the tiny white exam room. Dilandau's right hand, still full of shards of glass from the syringe and small threads of the blood, rested palm up on the table like a penitent. His red eyes ticked back and forth across the same patch of ceiling, unseeing.

"He clearly is shell-shocked," I spat, "This is classic post-traumatic stress disorder. He is a soldier who witnessed his entire command be decimated by the Escaflowne. All of his friends died in a forty-five-minute span-"  
"I have very little patience for being interrupted. I warned you once, now get out," Spala said, staring at me with loathing.  
"No." I said, feeling much braver than I felt.  
"You may have enthralled Mesmen and the rest of the bone-cutters with your nursemaid skills, but I am not impressed. Get her out of here please." I was escorted to the hallway, the door shut firmly behind me. This was the first time in my whole life, that I had stuck my neck out for someone else, and it felt like an impressively hollow gesture when I heard Dilandau start to scream.

No one looked at me when the sorcerers finally filed out. Jajuka pushed Dilandau through the door, his paw heavy on Dilandau's shoulder. At least they had bandaged his hand. We walked in silence to Dilandau's quarters, a small room at the end of a long hallway, furnished with a twin bed and little else. It could only be locked from the outside. Dilandau pulled out of Jajuka's grasp and fell heavily on his side. He scuttled to the far corner on his hands and knees, like the smallest creature escaping the danger of light. I could see blood welling up against the white bandages on his right hand. He pressed his back into the corner, holding his elbows in his hands and curling his knees into his chest. His teeth were chattering. Jajuka shut the door and locked it behind him.

"I saw what you did in there. I hope you aren't as violent with your other charges," I said, blocking the hallway. I expected an outburst, instead, Jajuka looked mournfully at me.  
"He is my only charge." I wished that my gift worked on Jajuka; the girl I had seen with him must have died. His violence towards Dilandau was inexcusable, still, the girl had plainly been someone that he was mourning. If I had known that, I wouldn't have sounded so accusatory.  
"I'm sorry that you lost her-"  
"I haven't lost her, as long as the boy lives," Jajuka said, more to himself then me. He spoke these words with religious conviction.  
"We need to work together to save him. He is helpless."  
"He is gone, and a good thing too. When he falls apart, there is one less monster in the world."

Fleeing into the searing heat of midday, I left the campus all together and wandered towards the hospital, the route familiar because I traveled it by coach each day. I walked next to the sluggish brown river and thought about my conversation with Jajuka and the wretch who had been Dilandau. What had Jajuka meant? Could the girl be a sibling? She had looked ill; even from across the green her sickness was evident. Perhaps, in addition to being used as a weapon, they were also farming him for his body. I thought about the copious amounts of blood they drew from him. It was conceivable that he was being used for transfusions, and perhaps that was how he was keeping the girl alive.

I had thought that I'd known what it was like to feel powerless during residency, but this was so much worse. I found myself wishing that Folken walked beside me, giving me the comfortable assurance of his presence. I imagined how I would place my hand in his big one and lean my head against his arm, and then he would press me against his chest and surround me, kissing my forehead. From the fortress of his arms, he would tell me that I did the right thing in speaking up for Dilandau.

I'd thought I'd known him, a brilliant man of exceptional cunning and coldly crackling temper, but he was something fantastical. I didn't trust my memory of the black feathers. I considered that I might have fallen asleep in front of the window and dreamed up his visit to my room, but my fingers vividly recalled the feeling of the hard lymph nodes beneath his skin. His strange wings didn't have the light, ethereal quality of dreams, instead the ropey muscles in his back and the sturdy grey shaft of each feather gave the wings a substance that was grotesque. They made him into a gargoyle, not an angel.

Folken hadn't said goodbye properly, probably thinking that after the meeting in my dorm room, further goodbyes would feel tragic and gratuitous. By now, his skin would be mottled and bruised, the soul-crushing fatigue of widely metastatic cancer would limit how much he could distract himself with work. His wings would have faded to a dull, dusty black. He would wake up drenched in sweat, surprised each dawn that he had survived the night. With his impending death, I would be completely alone, and there was nothing I could do to save Dilandau.

Zaibach's capital was polluted; the air gritty to breathe and thick grey sludge settled into the river in layers, soapy bubbles and iridescent oil covering the surface of the water like a tomb. Bitterly, I thought that if this was the future Zaibach was pursuing, perhaps it would be better for the Escaflowne to win, for Van to strike his sword into the very heart of Zaibach's capital so that blood would cleanse the streets. Fire would consume buildings and scorch the earth and generations of Astorian children would hear fables about the ghosts that roamed the wasteland after the fall of the Empire.

People were running past me, hoisting children onto hips and tucking parcels under their arms as they hurried. Was Escaflowne attacking, did my thoughts call this apocalypse into being? I shook my head. Hitomi might have visions, but I had no such gifts. There was no smoke, only nervous people rushing to the square. Something important was happening, though not an attack. I stood and followed them, drawn to the uproar.

As soon as I entered the square, I slowed down. Everyone was pressing towards a young magistrate. He stood on a crate and shouted the words at the top of his lungs. I could only make out the piping of his thin voice over the growling unrest of the crowd; I could not hear the words.

"It should have been a victory," a man next to me said, shaking his head. An old woman took my arm and shook it.  
"We stretched too far! This is the punishment of the gods!" she screamed hysterically. I jerked my arm out of her grasp and slipped past the people in front of me, to get closer to the magistrate. There were too many panicked thoughts for me to isolate a clear narrative.  
"The Vione has been shot down!"

Folken was dead already, burned alive as the ship went down or drowned in the sea shortly afterward. Perhaps this was better? That he should die in battle instead of sick and thin and febrile, fading away in a hospital bed in a body that had betrayed him. I felt dizzy; my mouth was dry and for a moment all I could hear was the pounding of my own heart. Just moments ago, I had imagined him so vividly that I felt the heat of his skin against my hand. Despite his cancer, he seemed so alive. I had thought he would have more time; I thought that I would have more time to come to terms with the fact his life would be cut short. But it didn't emfeel/em like he was dead; this must be what denial was like.

I should run; Zaibach would fall and my visions of fire and blood would come true. I didn't care if Zaibach lost, in fact, the things I had seen were disturbing and wrong. Feudal Astoria might be a kinder fate than Dornkirk's science, untempered by conscience or morality. I should hop a train and make for the border quickly, before the transportation out of the capital shut down.

But Dilandau, pathetic thing that he was now, was still alive and just as alone as I was. If I left him to the sorcerers and Jajuka, what would be left? He could be so cruel, more martial than man, and as Folken himself had said his humanity was a side product, an accident, which explained why it seemed so warped. I thought again of that bare bedroom, devoid of any semblance of personality. But there was something redeemable, wasn't there? There was something worth dying for. I allowed myself to examine Dilandau's memory of the battle. I was afraid of it, having picked it up from Dilandau the night of that terrible battle, as I sat at the end of his bed watching exhaustion and my drugs carry him off into sleep. I needed to know why the Dragon Slayers hadn't run to give me the courage to stay.

The Dragon Slayers hadn't died in battle; they died in sacrifice. Dilandau had seen them dismembered all around him. Gatti had fallen first, his blade arching gracefully before the Escaflowne ran its blade through him. Guimel's face was missing because he had thrown himself in front of a charge. He could hear their screams. It was impossible, how had they all died, and so quickly? The field around him was burning, through the smoke he could see the Escaflowne. But louder than the drumming of his heart and his own ragged breath, he was aware of their voices, which he heard as if they were all seated in the mess and he was just outside the door. Their words were indistinct, but he became aware of their voices, Guimel's in particular, in a rallying cry. Van charged and the ground shook with every step of the huge terrible armor. Dilandau screamed, shut his eyes, and prepared to be rent open by a guymelef blade and hot shrapnel from his alsedies. But Escaflowne stalled, teetered, and turned black as it fell to ground. He heard the voices of his dead men raise in cacophony and knew that somehow, they were responsible for this. Then, as clear as a bell, he heard Gatti shout You must retreat now, Sir!

I looked into the sky, the setting sun turning the polluted sky into fantastic oranges and pinks. Death was familiar to me. I had seen It often, hovering over the ventilated ICU patient, or capering in greed as men bled out on crude camp benches. I had seen men face death bravely, Guimel and Gatti and the man who reached for my hand as I released the pressure I'd been holding on his femoral. I would fight Death tooth and claw to keep Dilandau alive. It had taken my Dragon Slayers, had taken Folken, and it had marked Dilandau as its special pet. I had my full faculties and the benefit of four years of medical school. I wasn't useless. I could do this.


	25. Chapter 25

Chapter 25

The digital clock on the nightstand told me that I was far from my room in Zaibach's capital. I ran to the window and cast up the sash, weightless in my hands. Outside, a tree with thick foliage obscured my view of what I knew was a solitary moon. I heard the grind of tires on asphalt and I saw a set of headlights briefly light the tree in front of the window, the leaves flashing suddenly bright silver before returning to black, darker than night.

Sarah. The voice saying my name was too loud, banging in my skull. I knew the voice, having heard it in my head once before. Hitomi materialized out of the air near her bed. She smiled broadly, showing large, square front teeth.

"Am I actually here?" I asked, gesturing at her bedroom. Hitomi's smile faded after finding that I would not reciprocate it.

"No. You're still in Zaibach. Meeting you here, like this, was Folken's idea," Hitomi said. She said his name on purpose, setting it down between us like currency.

I knew it! He was still alive. This was why I hadn't felt any differently after hearing the news that the Vione had been shot down. He had used his wings and escaped the wreckage. But if he was alive, how did he know about my little gift? Why was he talking about me with Hitomi? I felt a sudden flash of betrayal, sudden and cacophonous against the joy I had felt knowing that he lived.

"Are you telling me that Folken defected?"

"Well, yes I guess so," she said before adding defensively "He wanted me to try to reach you, so that you would know that you were welcome in Astoria. He wanted me to give you a message. He wanted me to tell you that he wanted to redeem himself, and that he thinks that you were right about Emperor Dornkirk and the power of his machine."

I sat heavily in her chair, putting my head in my hands. He lived! But without me, without Dilandau.

"God, he was right the whole time," I said, remembering Dilandau's warning weeks ago, in a moonlight conference room on the Vione. Trust in a betrayer indeed. I didn't like to admit it, but I felt personally deceived, that his defection from Zaibach was a defection from me. He was a diplomat and a traitor, an angel with a cold and cruel temper, a dying man using the remainder of his life to control his legacy. I had thought I'd known him well when I thought he was just a mortal man, but that was an illusion. He always kept one part hidden and the doubts he had about the empire had been buried so deep that I hadn't found them, despite my gift.

He lied about his conviction to his cause, he lied when he said he loved me and I suddenly felt confident that despite Hitomi's earnestness about his message, he had withheld his actual motives from her as well. The truth, to Folken, was a matter of relativity. I lifted my head from my hands and saw Hitomi. She was doing her best to give me space, looking at the photographs on her bedside table as large tears rolled down her face.

"You miss it here," I said. She looked up at me, brushing aside tears with the back of her hand.

"Yeah," she whispered. She looked so wretched that I was moved to pity.

"Do you think you will be able to get back?"

"I hope so. I miss my mom, and my friends, and this room," she said, gently touching a stuffed bear that sat on a shelf.

"It's exhausting, isn't it? Just when you think you have Gaea down, everything changes," I said as Hitomi nodded, "I keep finding that I miss really small things, like listening to a CD on the El after a shift at the hospital."

"I miss the movies," Hitomi said, "And school." She scuffed her toe on the carpet of her bedroom. "And my friends. Everything here is so confusing." I saw her toy with her necklace. She was in love with Allen Schezar I realized, and I felt the sudden urge to ask if Folken had told her about the experiment that brought about their relationship, but I choked it down. It seemed too cruel. She looked at me with tortured eyes, tears glistening in the corners. She was completely overwhelmed and only fifteen. I felt an almost maternal instinct to protect her; she wasn't ready for this. I reached over and patted her shoulder.

"Would you ever go back, if you could?" she asked me. I looked away. Our circumstances here were too different to draw a comparison. She had been called here by some old magic, I by my own hand and technology. Old gods and new, I suppose.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean…" she said as she saw this play across my face.

"It's fine," I said sharply. Standing in her room, I was reminded that I would never return to my parents' home, would never hear my father's laugh, abrupt and loud as thunder. I missed Will, but I would be missing him regardless of where I was. I missed Folken too and the Dragon Slayers and Dilandau, at least the way he used to be. I took a deep breath, mastering these emotions and methodically locking them back down again.

"How did Folken know that you could reach me like this?" I asked, gesturing to her bedroom.

"I think it would be easier if I just showed you," she said.

The room instantly shifted, and we were in a library, bright Astorian sun shining through the window. Hitomi sat across from Folken at a table, inlaid with beautiful geometric patterns in creamy white and royal blue tile, her cards in a neat stack between them. He looked relaxed, though his skin was sallow, the circles under his eyes the same color as the tattoos on his face.

"He asked me to do a reading for him. He wanted to know about you."

Hitomi drew the first card, the World, and laid it in the center of the table. The next card was the High Priestess, the card after a stooped figure holding aloft a lantern, the Hermit.

"So, this represents Gaea in the middle. On the one side is the Priestess, and the other the Hermit," Hitomi explained to Folken, her fingertip gently tapping the cards as she spoke.

"I think I understand the meaning of the Priestess," Folken said with a long, lopsided smile, "But explain the Hermit to me."

"Well, the Hermit represents knowledge. Sometimes, it can mean that the person is being selective in whom they are confiding, or that they haven't revealed their knowledge yet," Hitomi said. Folken still looked confused, and Hitomi realized that I hid my gift from Folken. She worried that this revelation would hurt his feelings; he had been so sincere when he asked her to do a reading about his relationship. She wanted to protect him now that she realized I hadn't been completely open with him.

"Sarah's like me; she can see things," Hitomi said slowly. His eyes went wide, and he made a sound, halfway between a sob and a laugh.

"You two were so close, I thought that she would have told you. You didn't know?" Folken shook his head, the lines around his mouth tight. He looked at a place on the floor, left hand in a fist, prosthetic fingers of the right rattling across the inlaid table in rapid tattoo.

"Did she tell him?" he demanded, all of the fine courtly manners evaporated.

"I'm sorry, who?" she whispered, afraid that he was going to yell at her.

"I apologize, I shouldn't have lost my temper," Folken said, unctuous once more, "It's only that I loved Sarah. It hurts me that she couldn't confide in me. I must admit, I am a jealous lover, and I always fretted that she had given her heart to another. To the captain of the Dragon Slayers."

"I can try to see. It might take me a minute." Hitomi furrowed her brow. The first card she drew was the hanged man, Folken, followed by the reverse ten of cups, quarrelling and selfish exploitation. I blanched at the accuracy of this reading as it applied to our relationship. She pictured Dilandau and the big red machine, building an image of him in her mind and drew suits of swords, swords, and again swords. She shook her head, discarding these into a small pile by her elbow. She concentrated again. She hadn't seen him up close since the day at the Astorian fort and that was the vison that came to her, of silver hair, pale skin, and a deep frown. She drew the next card, but in that motion, another card came loose from the top of the deck and settled in front of her. This card, Stella, showed a woman under a night sky, one foot in a deep pool, the other on land. The card Hitomi held in her hand was the Devil card. It felt heavier than normal; Hitomi realized that another card was tightly stuck to the back. Using her fingernail, she pried the dog and wolf of La Luna from the back, the sides of all three of the cards sticky. The image of Dilandau came back to her, but just underneath his skin she had the sudden impression of something dark and angry, glimpsed just briefly through murky water, gone again to depths just as she registered the glare of eyes as blue as river stones.

"I'm not sure what this means. The star card is goodness, light and redemption. The Devil is Dilandau. La Luna represents the animal nature of things. Since the star card fell away and La Luna was stuck on

I think that this means that he's too far gone."

"No." I looked at the cards, feeling suddenly the full force of my kenning, "He is a prisoner." This was just the edge of a deeper truth, I could sense the presence of something much bigger just beyond my reach.

The memory faded and we were back in Hitomi's bedroom. The image, the eyes, were they the eyes of the black-haired woman? Who or what was haunting him? My mind was racing, I was so close to understanding!

"I'm sorry, but I don't think you're right. Sarah, I don't know how to say this, but I don't think he needs you the way that you need him."

"I think your assessment is backwards," I said defensively, furious as I felt the truth sink away from me.

"But we need you! Not just Folken, but all of us! Zaibach won't stand a chance if both of us are on the same side. Folken cares so much about you that he wanted me to see if I could reach you, to see if you would come to him. I know that it's hard for you sometimes to face your true emotions, but I know that he's a very special person to you and if you just listened to your feelings, you would see it too!"

This sentence rankled me to my core. The first assumption behind her young words was that that if a man thought I was worthy, then I must be so. The second assumption was that love had motivated Folken and I's moment of intimacy. The realization dawned on me, that of course Hitomi would conflate physical intimacy with love. Her own emotions were confused, unable to separate attraction, affection, and love. I had been in love, once, and what Will and I had was so very different from that fumbling night on the floor of Folken's library.

"You need to understand something. I'm not in love with Folken. I've never been in love with Folken. The only reason that I went to him that night was because Van killed the Dragon Slayers. These were boys I had talked to, I knew them! And suddenly they were all dead. It had nothing to do with Folken; I used him, just like your cards said," I declared in monotone, splinters of ice cold rage running through my veins.

"I don't believe you. I don't think you are the kind of person to use people," Hitomi said.

"I think I have a better grasp on who I am than you do, thank you very much. You have no idea what I have gone through."

"I think- "I could see what she was about to say, that we were so similar, torn by our love for two different men and our own feelings of smallness and inadequacy.

"No," I cut her off, "You have no idea and we are not the same. You are so reactive! Your entire sense of self is predicated on whether a boy likes you and you cleave to whoever that person is. You will never be strong enough to be alone, and you never would be able to survive what I've been through so don't condescend to me! You can't even see, can you? Van isn't innocent; he killed all of my friends, and he enjoyed it like a murderer!"

I needed to get her out of my head, to leave me alone. I forced us from her childhood bedroom into my memories. I took her to an OR and had her feel the warmth of distended, necrosed bowel in her hand, purple red with little flares of burst blood vessels and then I showed her the gore of a massive transfusion protocol for a trauma case. I brought her with me into hospital rooms; I wanted her to feel how despair grew, from the small space in between the shoulders to an exhausting weight that shrunk me each time the rubber tubing of the stethoscope was laid across my neck. We went to the muddy hospital tent of Freid's battlefield, she felt the grinding resistance as I sawed through bone, as the wet, granular mounds of femur gathered on either side of my saw. I showed her Dilandau's memory of the battle where the Dragon Slayers had been lost, I gave her their names and their past as Van struck each one of them down, reveling in the extinction of these men who had been my friends.

Enough! Stop it! She screamed and suddenly I was back in Zaibach, hearing the clang of steel blades as Jajuka and Dilandau sparred. Dilandau was still hesitant with his blade, at this point it was a victory if he even raised it to parry instead of throwing it aside and covering his head with his hands, shaking.

"Dilandau, can I talk to you for a minute?" Dilandau walked over, blade at his side, curious.

"What do you want?"

"I hate to tell you this, but Folken isn't dead. He defected. He is working for the Astorians now," I whispered to him.

"No" Dilandau said, eyes wide. His voice shook.

"It's almost as though he's DONE THIS BEFORE!" The shaking in Dilandau's voice manifested itself as his throaty laugher. At least he was still in there, somewhere.


	26. Chapter 26

26

Dilandau was getting better. Jajuka went through the same motions every time they sparred, it was almost as though he were practicing a dance that he didn't much like. Jajuka would unsheathe his sword and gently parry Dilandau's blows. Towards the end of that week, Dilandau started initiating the attacks, and by midway through the second I saw traces of that savage grace.

"Come on!" he screamed at Jajuka a few days later. A cold front had finally settled in, breaking the monotonous heat and endless dry wind. I sat on a bench near the gymnasium, huddled in a scratchy blanket from my room. At this point, I found the isolated clang of steel on steel to be almost soothing, so it was shocking to hear that merry, mad laughter. He was pressing Jajuka back across the padded ring.

"You're not trying. Hit me back!" Jajuka said nothing and made no motion to change.

"I know you've always liked her more, but guess what Jajuka? I'm here!" Dilandau screamed the word 'here' as he charged into the beast man. Jajuka bared his teeth and pushed hard against Dilandau.

"Good! Much better!" Dilandau laughed. They fought as though for real now, Jajuka with real anger behind his hits, Dilandau with his usual disregard for his own life. Dilandau knocked Jajuka's sword out of his hands eventually and laughed.

"God damn! That felt great!" he laughed, throwing the cheap practice sword aside.

"I'm glad you feel better, Sir," Jajuka growled, "If you forgive me, I have some business I must attend to."

"Oh, but Jajuka, we were having a breakthrough!" Dilandau laughed, first normally and then with an edge of hysteria.

"I need you to follow me," Jajuka said as he walked past. He refused to answer my questions as I fell into step behind him. There was a purpose to how he was walking that made me nervous. We entered the largest, newest research building and wound through dark halls of black stone. He stopped at an intercom and punched some numbers into wall. He arranged a meeting with the voice on the other side. We then waited outside of two large doors. We continued not speaking, although Jajuka started yawning frequently, showing long white teeth.

"It's time," he said tersely. The room was a large conference room, with several large chairs on platforms. Across from us, a large man hunkered in his chair, stroking his brown beard. His armor was the same color as Dilandau's. Next to him was a man much tidier in appearance than the first, who sat up straight in his chair and had a small bemused smile as he spoke with one of his aides. On the other side were two sorcerers, the older woman with iron grey hair and the much older, white-haired man that had thrown me out of Dilandau's exam room. Their aide was a slight, dark haired girl.

"Dr Schmidt, Jajuka, if you would find your seats we can get started," the woman sorcerer began, gesturing to similar chairs. I mounted the platform next to Jajuka and settled into the leather seat.

"You may begin when you are ready, Jajuka," the woman said. The elegant man held up a hand, twisting a ring on his finger as he brought his hands back together with the grace of a magic trick. His uniform was black with subtle crimson piping; embers and smoke.

"Sysle, we mustn't get ahead of ourselves without proper introductions," the man began, addressing his words directly to me, "I am Reddick, this is Adelphos, Sysle and Spala. This meeting is strictly confidential. It is very important that what we discuss here doesn't leave these four walls. Is that understood?" There was a subtle threat to his question. This was a man that would casually order your death, whispered to some shadowy aide, in between sips of wine from a fine crystal glass.

"I understand," I stammered.

"Jajuka?" the woman prompted.

"The boy is ready," Jajuka began, pausing to yawn nervously, the way that dogs do, "He has not regressed since his last treatment."

"How long is that?" Adelphos boomed.

"Almost 2 weeks," Sysle said after consulting some papers at her desk.

"Is that enough time to be sure it won't revert again?" Adelphos asked.

"Nothing is ever certain in science and religion," Reddick said with a smile, baiting the two sorcerers who pressed their mouths obediently into closed mouth grins.

"I want to be as sure as possible. I saw the reversion with my own two eyes. It's an abomination. If it happens again I will insist that the boy be destroyed. This experiment has gone too far."

"We have every reason to believe he should be stable at this point, General," Spala said. His voice was dry and weak.

"Does he seem back to normal to you?" Sysle asked Jajuka.

"Yes ma'am. He is fighting vigorously. He doesn't shake any more either."

"Oh, Jeture save us all, it has shell shock too!" groaned Adelphos, rubbing his eyes with his hands, "Could that have been related to its 'regression'?"

"That is unclear. Perhaps she can illuminate the initial stages of his illness," Spala said, rheumy eyes staring at me over the top of his glasses.

"He screamed a lot and didn't sleep; I believe he was suffering from severe post traumatic stress disorder. It was after the Dragon Slayers died- "I started.

"Speaking of that, I was wondering if the boy might do better if we returned him to his old duties. It might be less triggering to him and prevent further regressions," Sysle said.

"It wouldn't be too hard to roll the boy's death into that of his men. He could be of great use somewhere he had good name penetration, like Astoria," mused Reddick, "His vengeful ghost killing a few well-placed members of Aston's royal house would cause a great deal of unrest."

"I don't know if he could do that again, Sir," Jajuka said, his voice hitching up into almost a whine, "I don't know if he would be careful enough."

"Besides, the whole point of a ghost is that they don't bleed. And now that he is reckless, he would be caught, killed, and his body dragged through the streets. It rather loses its effect that way, doesn't it?" Spala spat. Reddick smoothed his beard and merely nodded. Adelphos' aide leaned forward and whispered something inaudible in his ear.

"Damn," he spat, "My aide reminds that his new machine is ready. Some of our engineers, working with that mechanic of his, designed him a better guymelef, better suited to him."

"A new machine?" Reddick asked, eyebrow raised.

"Yes. The Orestes, the first of its kind. We added some features and corrected some of the recurrent issues with the Alsedies model."

"You designed a machine specific to him?" asked Sysle, her face studiously bland, while behind her eyes I could feel her crowing in triumph.

"Yes."

"You designed a machine specific to one man? Particularly one whose military record can be characterized as having a cavalier attitude towards resource utilization?"

"It does justify the cost that you initially put into him and the rest of your brats. That was rather a dismal failure, wasn't it? Press was bad too," Adelphos fired back.

"Does it justify the cost though? I thought almost anyone could be a throat slitter with enough practice," Spala whispered caustically. Reddick's high, cultured laugh rang through the stillness of the room.

"There is an art to it, I promise you. Besides, I don't train them to go for the throat, it makes too much mess," Reddick said. His statement, naked in its calculation, accomplished its object.

"Well, that essentially settles it. The boy will redeploy," Sysle said, already standing and moving to go. She and Spala left as one, black cloaks whispering across the floor. Reddick stood next. He shook Adelphos' hand, made a joke about blockades and his favorite Astorian wine. He didn't look at me or Jajuka as he left.

"I need to speak with you two," Adelphos said, holding up his hand the second the door shut behind Reddick. I froze and lowered back into my seat. His voice was thunderously loud, even when speaking normally.

"You will deploy with him, Jajuka."

"Yes Sir."

"He is to have no other command."

"Yes Sir."

"And if he reverts again, you will dispense with him quickly." Jajuka and I shared a glance, but Adelphos got up and began to march out the door.

"Damn unnatural," he muttered as he strode out the door. Jajuka and I said nothing about this, as though to acknowledge it would make us complicit. Under no circumstance would I kill Dilandau, even if this reversion, whatever that was, occurred. There was not one image of a monster in anyone's mind.

We shipped out with the crew of the airship Delotte, which was a much smaller and older craft than the Vione. There was one regiment of pilots, a sorcerer-surgeon, and the captain of the vessel. The captain had insisted that we eat together that first night and was generous with the wine. We all enjoyed a quantity of it, but Dilandau drank with zeal, barely speaking other than to express his readiness for the oncoming battle. It was lovely to see that blinking anxiety dissolve, though his silence was still unnerving.

That night, I couldn't let go of wakefulness, jerking my limbs against the sensation of falling through the floor again and again. Sleep felt like something I'd forgotten how to do, and I kept congratulating myself every time my mind wandered. Had I just been asleep? Could I do it again? As I rolled over for the umpteenth time, I had the sudden, eerie sensation that something was in the bed with me. I kept my eyes shut; if I didn't see what it was, I couldn't be scared. But I knew that the body next to me was solid and cold and dead; rust colored blood crept across the sheets underneath me.

A throaty scream drilled into my skull, shattering the soft quiet and the illusion of the dream. Lights flipped on and I tossed a Zaibach dress over my head. I wasn't the only one who had woken; the halls were full of young men in various states of underdress, all fully armed. The screams came from Dilandau's room. He stood next to the bed screaming, his body slicked with sweat, his right hand gripped around the hilt of a knife.

The substance of his dream was still more real to him than his present. Dilandau kept seeing her pale body, her dark hair long and sticky from blood. Red spilled onto the white sheets and dripped onto the floor. He looked dumbly at the knife gripped in his hand. He had murdered her as she slept beside him, carved the gash in her throat himself. He'd killed what was dearest to him, he had destroyed his own heart. Blood crept under the bed towards him, even the walls bled. He jammed his fingers into his eyes, to unsee the blood and her body. He pulled his right had away from his face and looked at the knife. He turned the blade towards himself and slashed towards his neck. Jajuka grabbed his wrist and the two struggled for control of the knife.

"Dilandau it wasn't real! It was just a dream!" I screamed. Jajuka managed to wrest the dagger from his hands and threw it aside, grabbing Dilandau around the middle as he dove towards the blade. He tackled Dilandau to the ground and slapped him.

"You are dreaming! You are dreaming!" Jajuka shouted. Dilandau stopped struggling, letting his thin arms rest on the floor as his chest rose and fell in a slower rhythm. The other soldiers from the Delotte looked at Dilandau, now quiet and prone on the floor and so obviously sick, with disgust and left. Dilandau rolled to standing, checked under the bed and on the other side of his bed, coming up with a bottle of wine that he had stolen. He swept past Jajuka and retrieved the knife in the corner of the room, driving the blade into the cork at an angle and pulling the cork out with the ease of long practice. He pressed the bottle to his lips and drank deeply as though it were water, draining almost half of the bottle.

"The drinking might not help with the dreams," I said quietly. Dilandau met my eyes and took another deep pull.

"What would you know about it?" he asked roughly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Good night, Sir," Jajuka said quietly and we left him to his wine and nightmares.

After that night, Jajuka and I kept Dilandau well stocked with alcohol. He got piss drunk every day, to the point of throwing up. In his blackouts, he sometimes didn't know me, sometimes he didn't know Jajuka, and he almost never remembered that the Dragon Slayers were dead. He'd call for Gatti, who he thought to be standing just outside the door, awaiting orders. Still, drunk and lethargic was preferred to the panicked violence of a flashback.


	27. Chapter 27

Chapter 27

There was a small flash of light from the forward airship, still cloaked. The captain of the Delotte flipped a small switch and calmly ordered the pilots to deploy; he requested that Dilandau and Jajuka remain in the hangar. In a terrible black swarm, alsedies began to drop on Rampant while all of the airships around us uncloaked as one. The captain crossed his arms as flames began to bloom on the ground as Astorian men hurriedly tried to mount a defense against the surprise attack. They ran to the barracks, grabbing pikes and swords, dying in hordes as the buildings went up in flames around them. It quickly became difficult to see the battle field through the drifting smoke. Explosions and screams and the sounds of roaring flames were barely perceptible through the thick glass of the Delotte.

"That's the Crusade." Dilandau's voice crackled over the radio, "Give the order. Let me go." He speech was only a little slowed, the slurring faint. Jajuka and I had tried to titrate his alcohol carefully this morning, knowing that deployment was likely.

"General Adelphos suggested that I use him like an explosive; dropping him like a bomb where he might do the most damage," he said quietly, "You know him better than me, is it a good time?" The captain sounded nervous. He had heard the night-time screaming, had raised his eyebrows as Jajuka and I dragged his inebriated body back to his room. He knew that there must be some terrible reason why Dilandau, broken and mad, was still being used in combat. But this was a huge responsibility; I didn't want to be accountable for the men he would kill once he had been let loose.

"Open the hatch, get me down there damnit!" It was Dilandau who ultimately made the decision.

"You have permission to deploy," the captain said quietly. I watched as the red machine and the blue one appeared below us, landing in the middle of the melee. With a cackle, Dilandau torched the building behind him. He narrated his actions over the radio, a constant stream of drunken taunts and laughter. Normally an aggressive fighter, Dilandau was reckless. The new machine was bigger and more responsive to his quick turns than his old machine and he pushed it relentlessly.

"There it is, perfect!" he said as the Escaflowne dropped to the ground in front of him. He molded both of the crima claws into daggers and charged. The Escaflowne parried and thrust. Dilandau caught the blow between his two blades and ran at him again. Another machine appeared behind Dilandau's, this machine clearly older but piloted with a grace that more than adequately made up for it. Dilandau spun and caught the blade just before it would have made contact with him.

"I hate you Allen you bastard!" Allen met every one of Dilandau's blows and pushed him back hard enough that he had space to spin his sword and slash towards Dilandau.

Jajuka threw himself in front of Dilandau, catching the blow that would have cleaved through his machine easily. Allen charged again, bringing his sword down just as Dilandau spun, catching the new machine on the shoulder in a shower of sparks. Jajuka again launched himself at Allen and aggressively began to push him back. Dilandau charged at Van, screaming and cursing. They exchanged blows, Dilandau relentless and aggressive, Van losing ground bit by bit. Dilandau swung his sword back and threw all of his weight into the swing, and Van met it with a terrific clash that could be heard even in the Delotte control room.

There was complete silence; Dilandau's delirious narration ceased and there was a long stretch of static.

"Kill me," he whispered, his voice shaking, "Kill me! I know you want to!" The red machine lurched forward, suddenly ungainly. Van swung his blade and the blue alsedies dove in front, just catching the blade.

"You mustn't die Lord Dilandau!" Jajuka screamed.

"I want to die! I want to die! I want to die!" His voice became more strained; I could feel the tightness in his throat then, the dryness of his mouth and the pounding of his heart. His body felt dumb and slow and he felt entombed in the machine, arms held out when he wanted to draw them in, around himself to protect the tender, weak belly. The collar of the machine didn't fit as well as his old alsedies and suddenly he noticed how the hard metal bit into the back of his skull. His head was constrained, he was yoked in the machine and he panicked as the sensation of being strangled worsened.

"Get him out," I said, turning to the captain. I rolled my shoulders and shook my head, free of Dilandau's claustrophobic present. Perhaps seeing Dilandau on his knees, the Escaflowne began to press Jajuka back, trying to get past him to Dilandau, now an easy target on the ground. Watching them, I began to be aware of Escaflowne's pilot. I could taste the blood in his mouth from where he had bit his cheek. He finally was close enough to kill the man that had hounded him for so long. He would be free, and Hitomi would finally be safe from Dilandau and Zaibach, and maybe finally realize that he, Van, could protect her. I knew that I wasn't alone, Van's thoughts were reaching Hitomi in far-off Pallas, and I could feel her screaming as she felt his bloodlust. She didn't know him at all; she realized that I had been right in calling him a murderer.

"Get him out of there!" I screamed, in tune with the three other screams I heard in my head.

There was a blinding flash, and Dilandau was gone.

I came to in a dark cell, the back of my head throbbing and soft, all blood and bruised tissue like rotten fruit. Gingerly, I touched my scalp and was relived that my skull was smooth without any step-offs. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I made out the small reflections of light against the bars. I was in here alone. The pain was nauseating, but I didn't want to go back to sleep, unwilling to trust my body, unguarded, to the darkness of this cell. Something felt missing; like the heavy silence when the cicadas stop calling. I tried to remember what had happened, and I was able to recall everything until Dilandau vanished in the pillar of light. The rest was an uneasy void-how long had I been out?

The guards came for me. They didn't speak at all, just hauled me roughly up to standing. I reeled, dizzy with sparkling lights before my eyes. They slapped heavy iron cuffs around my wrist, and so bound, I shuffled behind them. The cuffs were too big, they slipped off of my wrists and dug into my thumb. I wiggled my hands but the metal bit painfully; I wasn't able to slide them off. They marched me through the massive ship and into a conference room. Already, I knew that this wasn't the Delotte, this ship was too big.

General Adelphos was pacing back and forth in front of a window while a sorcerer sat at the table, scowling at me. I was grateful to be able to rest my bound hands in my lap, taking the weight off of them. There were already angry red lines where the metal had been caught on my thumb. The guardsmen took their places next to the door.

"Are you working for Astoria?" the sorcerer asked. He had a broad face with a wide nose, skin greasy and flakey.

"No."

"How did you summon and direct that pillar of light?"

"I had nothing to do with that."

"I have a report here from the captain of the Delotte, who said that just before the boy vanished, you shouted something to the effect of 'get him out'. Does that sound familiar to you? Did you say those things?"

"If I hadn't been knocked unconscious I would probably have a better memory of it," I said this dryly, trying to mask my terror. The destiny sorcerers had all been suspicious of me from the beginning, and without Folken to protect me, I was at their mercy. Folken's defection probably only increased their distrust.

"The other girl is gone," the sorcerer said, watching my face carefully. He was being deliberately vague, trying to trap me.

"What other girl?" I asked, staring back at him, though I knew he meant Hitomi. I wasn't surprised. This explained that sensation of absence. Ignorance was safest here; I could only hope that I lied as well as Folken.

"That's enough," General Adelphos said in that booming voice, finally turning from the window. He sat down heavily in front of me and said, "If she was a traitor she would have turned with Folken." His eyes were bloodshot, his skin red and doughy with rosacea. He dismissed the sorcerer.

"I don't know anything about you, or the place where you came from. You may be a spy, or a witch, but I suspect that you are neither of those things. I think that you a perfectly ordinary girl with some skill in healing who is here by complete accident. Am I wrong?"

"No." It was so refreshing hear this put so plainly.

"I thought not. All of this chasing shadows and dragons when we need to be digging trenches and blockading ports."

"It doesn't sound like you're a big believer in the Destiny machine," I offered quietly. I couldn't tell just yet if he were talking more to himself or actually conversing with me. Adelphos looked at me suspiciously. His irises were vivid green against the pronounced red of the tortuous blood vessels coursing through the whites. He decided to laugh, a big, booming sound.

"I'm a soldier, I don't understand these things and I do what I'm told. Even if it flies in the face of logic. My orders are to throw all of my resources into finding the boy and to interrogate you, under force if necessary, to see if you are working in league with the Astorians." I shifted in my chair uneasily, the heavy chains of my handcuffs clinking. He looked at my hands and shook his head, saying, "But the alliance is more of a threat to us than one small girl, and the boy is expensive but effective." Adelphos stood and ordered the guards to release my chains.

"Jajuka has returned, Sir," the guard said.

"Send him in." Jajuka did his best not to look at me when he came in, fur glossy but eyes tired.

"Sir I searched the valley and found no sign of him."

"Or the Orestes?" Adelphos prompted. Jajuka shook his head. Adelphos looked helplessly from me to Jajuka, then seemed to make up his mind. "I can spare no more men. If the boy can be found, you two will do it. Is that understood?" We nodded and Adelphos left. Jajuka said nothing and followed on his heels, not condescending to even acknowledge my presence.

I wandered to the hangar to see if I could get a better idea of where we were. On a busy airship like this, it was a bustling place, full of pilots and mechanics, docking ships and thundering engines. I leaned against the railing of the main deck, looking out at the mountains beyond. Two mechanics stopped near me and I overheard their conversation.

"Did you service the one that just came in?" one asked of the other.

"The one brought in by the dog? Bay 3? Yeah, I checked it out. Nothing needed doing, fuel tank's almost full still."

"Does it need to be topped off?"

"No. Like I said, still almost full." The men began to move away, while I began to hurry towards Bay 3. Jajuka had either found Dilandau and was lying about it, or he had quit trying.

I found his Alsedies quickly and ascended the steps towards the launching platform. There was a button on the front shield that would open the cockpit. My sweaty fingers depressed the button; the shield hinged open and the cage descended. It seemed impossibly loud, but no one in the busy hangar cared about what I was doing. The cage consisted of a steel platform, surrounded on three sides by metal rings. There was a small lever that, when depressed, raised the cage back into the machine. The front shield closed behind me, and I was enveloped in the claustrophobic dark of the machine. The cage was raised within the machine based on the pilot's height. Since Jajuka was much taller than I, I would have to climb to get up to the collar, and I set my feet on the lowest bar and began to scale the bars of the cage. I poked my head through the heavy rubber that lined the inside of the collar and the sense of separation from one's body was acute. Light that filtered through the heavy, scratched glass of the cockpit, surrounded by a myriad of controls. There a large button, meant to be pressed with the chin to turn on the radio that was almost always activated accidentally, resulting in the transmission of swearing, screaming and heavy breathing into the distant control rooms. There was a lever beside the right cheek; activated with a swift jerk of the head to the right, it raised the telescoping lens up to the eye. To the left, a fuel gauge, altimeter, and odometer, which reported beneath it the distance of the most recent flight. Jajuka had not gone far at all. Certainly not far enough to have searched the entire valley, as he had told Adelphos.

I scrambled out of the Alsedies as quickly as I could and set off to confront Jajuka. I didn't bother knocking. He woke quickly, still in his uniform.

"You lied," I said, "Why haven't you been looking for him? Did you find him already?" He sat up and yawned, showing long canine teeth.

"He is safe," Jajuka said quietly.

"Where is he?"

"What does it matter to you?" Jajuka growled, "He is safe. If I bring him back here, he will die."

"He is the most distinctive-looking person in the entire army, who is down somewhere in enemy country. I don't think he has much of a chance out there," I shot back.

"I don't understand, why are you so attached to him? He is not a good person. The only thing about him of value is the fact that he still has breath."

"Because it's my duty. He has no one but me. And it's your duty to bring him back. I'm sure Adelphos would be interested to know that his expensive machine has been found but that you didn't care to report it." Jajuka stood, lip curling above yellow incisors.

"As you wish."

"Radio Adelphos directly when you find him. No sorcerers." He pushed past me and left within the hour.

Jajuka was gone for two days, but he did find Dilandau. As we agreed, he radioed Adelphos, who consented to allow only Jajuka and I to debrief him. I sprinted to the hangar, arms full of bandages and blankets. Jajuka docked and glared at me, eyes narrowed, as he opened the hold and Dilandau stumbled out. He was shirtless, skin laced with innumerable scratches and large red welts from insect bites. His leather pants were ruined, and his bare feet were black on the bottom with dirt. I marched up to him and threw the blanket over his shoulders and hair and we quickly brought him back to Jajuka's room. He sat heavily on the bed, elbows on his knees, cradling his head in his hands. The dog tags spun on their chain, throwing small flashes of light. Jajuka hovered near the door, arms crossed, looking furious.

"What can I get for you? Do you want water?"

"Wine," he croaked.

"I have medicine," I gestured to my box, which contained sleeper flower and the sedative that worked like a benzodiazepam.

"No! I need to be able to think," Dilandau said miserably, "Are the sorcerers coming?" He looked towards the door and his eyelids beat down across his eyes in a quick, nervous stutter.

"No. They don't know that you're back."

"My guymelef-"

"I've dispatched crews to collect your machine my Lord," Jajuka said.

"Good."

"What happened?"

Dilandau looked between his fingers at me, then shut his eyes tight and shook.

"I want it to be over. I can't do this anymore." He dropped his hands, head lolling, and reached for the freshly poured glass of wine. He rolled the liquid around in his mouth before swallowing and said, "The blockade must still stand. That garbage is from Zaibach grapes."

He shut his eyes and remembered the small, dark place. It was the place where _she_ put him, when _she_ wanted his body. It was his fault, he had surrendered it to her[CM1] . She had forgotten him though, and though it took every once of energy, he was able to see through her eyes and read the name etched on the stone, carefully enunciating so that she would hear him, even though he was so small. _Encia._ The word caused her to completely lose control, forgetting in an instant to hold him down in the dark. He came forward, surging up to lay claim to the muscles and nerves and skin and heart that were his. He tried to drown the memory of that horrible dark place, and quickly finished his glass and then another.

"I don't know what happened to me," he said in a shaking voice. I couldn't understand what he had shown me. What was the blackness and who was she? The memories were so abstract, it was unlike anything I had experienced in anyone's mind. Was this what PTSD felt like? Had Dilandau been in a fugue state?

"Sir, I have your marching orders," Jajuka said. Dilandau's head snapped up, greedy for the distraction, for motion.

"He just got back," I protested.

"Per General Adelphos, he is to deploy again as soon as we get the machine back," Jajuka said, handing Dilandau the scroll with his orders. Dilandau read the orders twice.

"This is where it's going to be, huh?" he asked of Jajuka.

"Yes sir. The sorcerers have identified this spot as the one where we will fight our battle."

"The ground is shit," Dilandau commented, "Best get this over with."

"He is not well enough to go into battle!" I shouted.

"You have orders as well," Jajuka smirked and handed me a scroll. I unrolled it, taking a second to puzzle out my instructions. I was to report to the medical officers' tent at the rear of the camp.

"I guess this is it then," Dilandau commented, staring out the window, "Our last great battle."


End file.
